Experimental Film

Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on films made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental filmmakers created films without soundtracks, purely visual experiences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film "Window Water Baby Moving" as a way of outlining
some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms.

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.

Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Vivemos num mundo em ruinas, vivemos no limite das condições de existência, vivemos na
beira da barbarei e ao mesmo tempo desde sempre somos à beira da floresta. A vida é
co-existência, co-evolução e já não podemos nos dar mais o luxo de dizer “floresta” como se
fosse algo externo a nós. Ela não é meio ou em todo caso somos meio junto com ela, somos
continuidade fractal com ela. Isto é, conjugar o verbo “humano” é conjugar um verbo
composto que sempre é “humano-floresta”. Neste par e conglomerado “humano-floresta” se
abre a possibilidade de pensar “entre” e “com”, de pensar o devir de entre-humanidades com
a floresta como multiplicidades e heterogeneidades que da ruina, ainda fazem emergir algum
possível, alguma novidade em meio ao esgotamento. A floresta sempre re-nasce e nos cabe
cuidar de sua potência genética.

... One can and perhaps should posit, consequently, that this has led to at least two central areas being presently under-researched and largely ignored in eyetracking studies. First, the gaze analysis of film and television documentary. Second, the evaluation of experimental film in relation to gaze patterns and modes of attention and comprehension (see Redmond and Batty 2015 ). It is the aim of this chapter to rectify this absence by attending to one of these research deficiencies – the exploration of experimental film – through a combination of eye-tracking analysis and post-screening questionnaires (more on this to follow). More specifically, the central aim of this chapter is to bring eye-tracking technology to those experimental films that not only eschew the codes and conventions of narrative cinema, but offer the viewer only abstract shapes and silence or discordant sound with which to engage, gaze upon, listen or attend. Our focus, then, will centrally be on abstract experiment film with one notable exception, the Stargate sequence from 2001 (Kubrick 1967), employed as a counterpoint to assess how abstraction is viewed in what is otherwise predominately an art-narrative science fiction film. We have chosen to focus on abstract experimental film for three reasons: first, devoid of human bodies and interactions, the observable screen is a chaotic canvass without obvious narrative cues or continuity principles to ‘bind’ the viewer and to hold their attention. Our meta questions grow from this concern: where do we look and what do we gaze upon when faced with lines, colours and contours that are not defined or have full definition? What do we comprehend when faced with lines of abstraction? What memorial and emotional work do we undertake to make sense of the fragmented and fragmentary worlds of abstract experimental film? In terms of narrative cinema, the tendency to fixate on the centre of an image, termed the central bias, is a well-documented phenomenon (Vitu et al. 2004 ; Tatler 2007 ).The contention in this chapter is that the pull to the centre may well be torn apart by abstract experimental cinema’s tendency to treat the screen’s margins or peripheries as elemental to its shape-making and aesthetic explorations (Brown 2015). Second, the chosen films have a high degree of materiality or texturality: they are made up of impressionable surfaces and these are unevenly layered over one another. Our meta questions here are framed as follows: what do we see when the screen is itself moving like a living tissue or a conductive surface? How might such forms of sensory and organic abstraction affect our emotional responses? What memories might we draw upon to comprehend and make meaning out of such abstractions? When viewing narrative cinema, there are two primary cognitive theories addressing what drives the control of the placement of our fixations. According to the visual saliency hypothesis, fixation locations are selected based on image properties generated in a bottom-up manner from the current scene (Theeuwes 2010 ). This is where gaze control, to a large degree, is a reaction to the visual properties of the stimulus being viewed. In contrast, the cognitive control hypothesis maintains that fixation sites are targeted based on the drive of the cognitive system in relation to the current task in a top-down model ( Hayhoe and Ballard 2005 ; Henderson et al. 2007 ). The cognitive hypothesis posits that eye movements are primarily controlled by task goals interacting with both a semantic interpretation of the scene and our memories from similar past viewing experiences( Henderson and Ferreira 2004 ). The distribution of fixations over a scene is also subject to change, depending on whether the viewer is searching for something or trying to memorize something from that scene ( Henderson et al. 1999 ). By contrast, embodiment theory and film phenomenology extend the reading of fixations to draw on the idea of the co-synesthetic qualities of proprioception ( Sobchack 2004 ), or the theory that all the senses are drawn upon when viewing the moving image. Third, the chosen films have a discordant soundtrack or have no sound at all. Where there is sound, it is both asynchronous and atonal, or it is used to signify disembodied flight and transcendence. When sound is absent, the image is left fl uttering away on the screen, its own mausoleum. The meta questions that frame our thinking here are: what affect does discordant sound have on gazing and comprehending? Does a silent abstract film produce a different type of gaze pattern and sense of forbearance and/or reverie? How do viewer’s match image abstraction to acousmatic sound ( Chion 1994 )? The three films we have chosen to analyse as our case studies for this chapter are: Mothlight (Brakhage 1963), La Région Centrale (Snow 1971) and our counterpoint text, 2001 (Kubrick 1967). Each film presents us with a different type of experimental abstraction and…

After almost a decade of post-war reconstruction, from the 1950s to the early 1970s Italy went through a period of deep economic growth, usually referred to as the Italian economic miracle or boom, during which the country evolved from a relatively poor, rural nation to global industrial power. However, as it happened in many other western countries, what started out as a utopian phase of progress, turned out to be in fact a moment of drastic changes in human behavior and social life, brought by the mass migration from the countryside to metropolitan areas, the informatization of labor, the mass diffusion of television, and the birth of electronic culture. The countercultural movement of the 1960s, as well as several avant-garde artists associated with the movements of Arte Povera and Radical Architecture, exposed the dystopian consequences of the economic boom. Seen in retrospect, what was at stake for them was that electronic technology was eliciting the automation of life.

This paper aims to explore the ambiguous technophilic dimension that surrounded electronic technology in Italy during the 1960s, as it emerged from two cinematic works that epitomized two antithetical positions: Elea Classe 9000 (1960) directed by Nelo Risi and Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on the Earth (1972) by Superstudio. The former is a 32-minute 35 mm documentary produced by Italian typewriters and computers manufacturer Olivetti to promote the company’s early computer series Elea 9000 designed by visionary architect and designer Ettore Sottsass. Directed by Risi, the film featured illustrations by graphic designer Giovanni Pintori and a soundtrack by experimental composer Luciano Berio, renowned pioneer of electronic music. The latter is a 10-minute 35 mm film by Florence-based Radical Architecture collective Superstudio on the occasion of their participation in the landmark exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972.

Rehana Zaman's Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014) was first exhibited as a multi-screen installation at The Tetley, a contemporary art space housed in the former headquarters of Tetley's Brewery in Leeds, England. Commissioned by the gallery, Zaman's moving image work references an earlier moment in the history of the brewery and interweaves the accounts of two groups— the former workers of Tetley and the recently-formed Leeds wing of Justice for Domestic Workers (JD4W)—who are at a temporal, political, and cultural remove from one another. The stories of these two groups are framed by a common concern relating to the labour movement and its response to working conditions in one former British industrial centre. Yet the video also utilises two distinct visual strategies to foreground differences between past and present struggles. 'Bittermen', a six-part soap opera, tells the story of workers at Tetley's Brewery in Leeds at a time when, in the early 1990s, the company underwent a process of major restructuring. This dramatisation of an episode in Tetley's worker relations is paired with footage documenting a series of meetings that occurred in 2014, when a group of Leeds-based migrant domestic workers began to organise around the issue of formal recognition for domestic workers within UK immigration laws. The footage from these meetings incorporates lower production values and is comprised as though from raw material. I began this interview, which was commissioned as part of the 'Now Showing' series organised by feminist film and video distributor Cinenova, by asking Zaman about why she employed these divergent visual strategies.

This essay focuses on the Filipino American filmmaker Miko Revereza, who is “out” about his undocumented status, in order to document the possibilities of counter-assimilationist expression by migrants who are undocumented. In his awardwinning autobiographical film Disintegration 93-96, Revereza uses footage from the glitchy VHS “video letters” that his family recorded and sent from California to relatives in the Philippines in the 1990s. In contrast with the model of the ideal DREAMer, who integrates into the state, Revereza creates an aesthetic of imperfection and a space of “disintegration,” widening the possibility for counter-assimilationist expression by migrants who are undocumented.

From Millennium Film Journal, no. 70 (2019): 24-33. Coauthored with Faith Holland.

Errata: for "Moulton's deft use of the video medium has often been used to," read "... use of the video medium has often gone far to ..." (p. 29); for "know myself" read "know thyself" (p. 30)

contact: sethwatter@gmail.com faholland@gmail.com

Going through the book entitled Film Unframed: A History
of Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema, edited by Peter
Tscherkassky, one effortlessly discovers the rich history and
versatility of the artistic production in our neighbouring
country. The book has been issued by the Sixpack Film company, a wondrously agile production and distribution house, which finds time and space for education as well. It was founded by Tscherkassky himself, who a long, long time ago, in the early 1978 attended a lecture by P. Adams Sitney in the Austrian Film Museum.

Resumo

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre A Dança dos Paroxismos (1929), de Jorge Brum do Canto (1910-1994), motivada por diversas pistas de interpretação lançadas nos intertítulos iniciais, designadamente a apresentação da obra como um “ensaio visual” e como um “filme português”, e a dedicatória ao cineasta Marcel L’Herbier. Perspetivando o filme em função de alguns pressupostos do cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa, na qual se inscreve L’Herbier, identifica-se e caracteriza-se um programa estético que, no filme de Brum do Canto, se materializa numa questão que, sendo primariamente diegética, transporta também implicações teóricas determinantes: todo o filme corresponde à alucinação de um moribundo. Através de uma análise aproximada de A Dança dos Paroxismos, investiga-se, por fim, de que modo este filme — um dos primeiros casos de “cinema onírico” — pode constituir um complexo “ensaio visual” sobre o cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa.

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

El artículo estudia la influencia del pensamiento existencialista en dos filmes cubanos de los años 50 y 60: el extravagante mediometraje de Mario Barral, De espaldas (1956) y el olvidado filme de Alberto Roldán, La ausencia (1968). En ambos casos se trata de obras con aspiraciones artísticas y experimentales que intentaban dar un giro al cine que se venía haciendo en la Cuba de aquellos tiempos. La película de Barral rompe con las visiones estereotípicas dominantes en el periodo prerrevolucionario; la de Roldán muestra el impacto de un existencialismo engagé, el único posible durante el periodo de consolidación de la Revolución.

This article proposes the phytogram, an image made by using the internal chemistry of plants in conjunction with photographic emulsion. First, a theoretical framework is set out, drawing inspiration from structural/materialist film theory, biosemiotics and perspectivism. The notion of plant sensations/perceptions is questioned, developing the real possibility of human–plant communication. Subsequently, a summary of the materials and methods involved in making phytograms is included in order to show how an inter-dependency of technological and natural elements can lead to evocative results and spontaneous animation. Instead of bringing inert matter to life, the image moves by itself. This practice can bring people together, sharing knowledge about their environment while enjoying the cohesion of a wider community and history of people and plants. Making such an extended community visible is significant with regard to a heightened awareness of the natural environment. Instead of preaching ecological propriety and austere behaviour, phytography offers a positive and fulfilling engagement with our living environment.

How do moving image media enable inquiry into core urban studies questions or topics? What can video art, experimental documentary, and sensory ethnography teach us about the practice of urban research? How can we build on the traditions of first person and essay cinema to produce compelling documents of our own questions and findings? This course surveys a range of film and video works on themes such as the production of space, urban nature, infrastructure, and collective memory. As an advanced theory-practice course, it combines seminar readings and discussion with regular screenings and a series of workshops on photo, video, audio, and postproduction skills.

The first institutional history of European avant-garde cinema in the 1920s. Through the lens of the Stuttgart "Film and Foto" exhibition, the film portion curated by Hans Richter, this essay intertwines the history of European avant-cinema, both as a mode of production and exhibition practice, with contemporary film theory. The result are the beginnings of film culture in Europe before 1930.

The essay examines a paradox of visuality in video art and photography by addressing a number of issues such as manipulation, quotation, remediation, unstable mediums, artistic hybrid discourse, and cross-referentiality. I propose the concept of In Between Frames as the main theoretical instrument to analyze this paradox. The term In Between Frames describes the median zone in arts and media productions, the “interstice” that breaks with appearances and conventions, that defies any predictable accounts and established principles related to medium, technology, cultural patterns, or power configurations. Crucial in defining the conceptual and functional dimensions of being In Between Frames is the time factor. The artworks discussed here—Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and Adad Hannah’s “video stills”—opt for an atypical temporality, one that undermines not only the narrative, understood in the traditional sense as a flow of sequences in time, but also—and this is my main argument here—the very definition of their own medium (photography and video, respectively). Undermining, as I will demonstrate, is not simply an act of negation, but rather a process of remediation: photography turns into film, and video aspires to the condition of photography—a way to recuperate, reevaluate, recite and recycle a medium by turning into its opposite.

이 논문은 최근 10년 간 한국 독립영화 비평에서 주목을 받아 온 정재훈과 임철민의 영화를 ‘디지털 실험 다큐멘터리(digital experimental documentary)’의 관점에서 논의한다. 여기서 실험 다큐멘터리는 영화 제작의 목적과 양식 및 영화의 상영에 있어 서로 구별되는 두 범주로 인식되어 왔던 다큐멘터리와 실험영화의 생산적 교차와 상호 영향을 바탕으로 한 영화적 실천의 결과물을 가리킨다. 이렇게 볼 때 디지털 실험 다큐멘터리는 디지털 테크놀로지의 다양한 활용이 이와 같은 두 범주의 혼종적인 교환을 가동시키는 데 결정적인 역할을 수행하는 영화적 실천으로 정의된다. 정재훈(<호수길> [2009], <도돌이 언덕에 난기류> [2017])과 임철민(<프리즈마> [2013], <야광> [2018])의 영화적 실천을 디지털 실험 다큐멘터리의 관점에서 분석함으로써 이 논문은 한편으로는 이들의 영화가 필름 영화와는 다른 디지털 테크놀로지의 미학적, 형식적, 경험적 새로움을 탐구하면서도 다른 한편으로는 이와 동시에 이 테크놀로지의 매체-특정적 특징들을 영화사에서의 실험 다큐멘터리의 형태, 기법 및 관습과 연결한 결과로 볼 수 있음을 밝힌다.

This paper investigates the films of Jung Jae-hoon and Lim Cheol-min, which have received notable critical reception in Korean independent film criticism during the last decade, in terms of digital experimental documentary. Here, experimental documentary refers to a kind of films predicated upon the productive intersection and cross-influence of experimental film and documentary, two categories that have largely been regarded as mutually distinct or exclusive in the light of the purpose and mode of film practice, as well as of film exhibition. In this sense, digital experimental documentary can be defined as a set of films in which digital technology plays a vital role in facilitating the hybridized exchange between experimental cinema and documentary. Through the lens of digital experimental documentary, this paper demonstrates that the films of Jung (Hosu-gil [2009] and Turbulence at Dodoli Hill [2017]) and Lim (Prisma [2013] and Glow Job [2018]) explore digital technology’s formal, aesthetic, and experiential novelties while also linking its medium-specific features to the forms, conventions, and techniques of experimental documentary that have been developed in the history of cinema.

It could be said in different ways. Désoeuvrement for Blanchot. Melville’s Bartleby formula: “I would prefer not to”. The procadence that Fellini’s cinema professes,  or the exhaustion of the speech that phagocytes itself and occupies, without counting or telling, in Beckett. Ways of appearing of the refusal, the unfinished, the fugitive movement that recedes before the forms. Going back to Heraclitus, and moving on by Whitehead’s side, declaring that you never think twice about the same thing, because thought is pure process, continuum without beginning and end, modulation of forms to de-formation, rhythms to proliferation. Neither recognizing or surrendering to the prevailing hylemorphism. It could be said in a singular and profoundly anomalous way: Deep Blue. A place? No, rather an affective tonality, an anonymous occasion for a possible adventure of thought. A speculative fabulation, Donna Haraway would have said. A pre-individual community of thinkables that finds a singularizing attractor in cinema. A radical nomadism, where cinema, as a connective technique, makes up unprecedented relationships and connections across transversalities that make the cosmos germinate in multiverses that the point of view of creation explores, experiments and exhausts. A devotion to the moving of life that is affirmed in the course of devorations, diffractions, and obliquities. Without a priori, without presuppositions, without location or measure, being a remaining rest, ruin and excess of life to come. Aqueous immediation as journey and medium.

The visualizations of the cosmos in Japanese culture are connected with the vision presented in Nihongi, the chronicle of Japan. The universe described in the foundation myth was the source of inspiration for Japanese artists through ages. The unique collection of myths also had an influence on the avant-garde directors, among whom the author of this article chose Takahiko Iimura, Takashi Ito and Takashi Makino. The mentioned artists represent three generations of filmmakers,
who used the vision of space to transfer metaphysical meaning. Using experimental techniques, they search for new interpretations of the mythical stories and show to their viewers the unusual depths of the abstract, whirling supernovas.

Nous explorons dans ce travail académique la relation paradoxale qui existe entre scénario et documentaire. Si le documentaire est la "saisie du réel" et le scénario se défini comme une structure préexistante pour un tournage, comment ces deux termes se conjuguent-ils?
Nous utiliserons des objets d'analyse issus de la narratologie, en même temps que des concepts de théorisation du documentaire proposés par des auteurs tels que Jean-Luc Lioult ou Michael Renov, Bill Nichols et Paul Ward, qui ont défini plusieurs "modes" à travers lesquels se manifeste cette forme filmique. Ces modes documentaires ont en effet un rapport différent et précis avec le scénario, qui peut emprunter alors différentes formes et modes d'emploi.

In the early twentieth century, Erik Satie argued for the necessity of ‘furniture music’. Such compositions would not monopolize the audience's attention, but would instead serve as the backdrop for other experiences. This essay suggests that Satie's formulation provides a useful framework for understanding the early cinema of Andy Warhol. While films like Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964) are often conceptualized as experiments in boredom, I claim that they are best understood as furniture films, works designed to be consumed partially and distractedly in conjunction with other experiences, such as conversing, eating and drinking. Furthermore, I argue that in Warhol's cinema, the rigid and predetermined temporality of traditional motion pictures gives way to one that is open-ended and amorphous, thus paving the way for new modes of cinematic reception.

Autores de una extensa filmografía iniciada a finales de los años 70, en sus documentales Yervant Gianikian y Angela Ricci-Lucchi redescubren, analizan y devuelven a nuestro presente episodios trágicos, pero volatilizados del relato oficial, que han determinado la historia e ideologías del pasado siglo XX. Mediante su trabajo con imágenes de archivo, la mirada de los cineastas busca detenerse, profundizar y analizar estas imágenes rescatadas y remontadas con el objetivo de evidenciar cómo la ordenación del mundo a partir de la visión colonialista -“Dal polo all’equatore” (1986)-, o cómo la violencia de la guerra y sus heridas irreversibles – en la llamada trilogía de la guerra, formada por “Prigionieri della guerra” (1996), “Su tutte le vette é pace” (1999) y “Oh! Uomo” (2004)- han afectado y continúan afectando la historia de Europa. Mi comunicación se centra en la metodología de trabajo de Gianikian y Ricci-Lucchi, la llamada cámara analítica, y más concretamente en su documental “Oh! Uomo”, para estudiar cómo en este filme el concepto de reconstrucción de la memoria histórica pasa por la reconstrucción de los cuerpos de los soldados heridos de la Primera Guerra Mundial, y en paralelo al proceso de trabajo de los realizadores: es decir, cómo el fragmento visual, “los trapos de la historia” según los postulados de Walter Benjamin en su “Libro de los pasajes”, y cómo la sutura de estos pedazos de antiguas películas en un nuevo cuerpo fílmico constituyen elementos indispensables en el discurso de Gianikian y Ricci-Lucchi y en su lucha contra la amnesia histórica.

The contingent instant that Walter Benjamin, among others, claims photography uniquely makes palpable has no place in film. Cinema relies on the impermanence of such elusive moments to generate continuity and presence. This article shows how Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 experimental short "Walking from Munich to Berlin" combines photography and film in a way that stages the incompatibility of these technologies, while also forging a new visual language – a radical form of animation – with which to overcome it. The article examines Fischinger’s work as a singular contribution to animation and the avant-garde of the Weimar era and beyond, unraveling its philosophical implications for theories of collecting, film, photography, and animation

This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning’s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker’s ‘Trauma Cinema’, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper’s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein’s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify ‘unspeakable’ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein’s violent acts, rather than Protti’s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film’s structure and content.

This article seeks to provide a theoretical justification and context to the understanding of cinematography as affective space, both in the aesthetic effects in the film image and in how this understanding can inform a specific approach to cinematography in experimental camera practice, with a potential application to larger film productions. Affective space, as this article argues, depends on a film’s aesthetic impulse against the seamless impression of reality; the notion of affective space rests on the assertion that the aspects of the filmed reality and the aspects of the camera (such as framing or depth of field) merge into a single two-dimensional surface in the moment of capture, and that these two sides are inseparable on the level of the image, forming a new aesthetic reality, which has the potential to transform and partially abstract a sense of representation of ordinary space. The notion of affective space synthesises various sources in film theory and ontology, but then applies these concepts through film practice, leading to the development of new cinematographic techniques. Affective space represents an understanding of film developed through a wider AHRC-funded practice research entitled Affective Cinema, and relates to Deleuzian affect theory and Marks’s haptic visuality. This article explains the conceptual field surrounding affective space, and then presents a set of experimental methods and insights resulting from the practical application of the theory. In this way, the underlying research transcends the division and distinction between theory and practice.

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars (New York: Routledge, 2018)
See https://www.routledge.com/The-City-Symphony-Phenomenon-Cinema-Art-and-Urban-Modernity-Between-the/Jacobs-Hielscher-Kinik/p/book/9780367459475#