Rudolf Arnheim (1904 - )
Biography
Rudolf Arnheim (born July 15, 1904) is a German author and theorist of Gestalt perception. His major work is Art and Visual Perception, published in 1954. He suggests ten areas of concern: Balance, Shape, Form, Growth, Space, Light, Color, Movement, Tension, and Expression.Arnheim has lived and worked in Germany (1904-1933), Italy (1933-1938), London (1939-1940), New York (1941-1968), Cambridge, Massachusetts, (1968-1974) and Ann Arbor, Michigan, (1974-today).--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Arnheim [Aug 2004]
New York Film Society
In 1953, that's when I [Jonas Mekas] started the first screenings of what was called at that time Experimental Films. I showed the Whitney Brothers, Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger. I started my own screenings at Gallery East, which was on Avenue A and 1st street. As you can see, I didn't move very far... Or on Ludlow Street, in the loft of a woman by the name of Dorothy Brown. She had weekend screenings on Ludlow Street. And Gideon Bachmann was running the Film Study Group, which I joined. I helped to write notes. Once a week or so, or every two weeks, we had screenings, usually with filmmakers present. And it goes. Actually, the second evening when I came to New York, when I landed here, I was already at the movies. I saw THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1928) and THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI (1920) on 16th street or somewhere, at the New York Film Society run by Rudolf Arnheim. --http://www.cinemadmag.com/print_issue_six_jonas_mekas.htm [Aug 2004]To Maya Deren [...]
Rudolf Arnheim
from "To Maya Deren" in Film Culture No. 24. Spring, 1962
There is another, quieter but more magical [miracle of photography], one, which is that of the transformation of reality accomplished by the medium itself. While photographs earn gratitude by preserving corporeal appearance, we admire the new technique even more for its being able to dematerialize the familiar face of the girl into a precise shape of transparent whiteness...This transformation is the true miracle of the photographic image; and Maya Deren was one of its most delicate magicians....
She was one of the artists and thinkers who speak of the great paradox of our time; who say that, although our civilization has come closest to penetrating the secrets of inorganic and organic matter, we are less familiar with the world of tangible things than any human tribe has ever been. And thus, in Maya Deren's films, the familiar world captures us by its pervasive strangeness...
Maya Deren was always interested in ritual. She went to Haiti in search of the remnants of a culture in which symbolism of the human gesture and of the space in which the body moves was still standardized by what psychologists call "consensual validation." We, in the New York of the twentieth century, no longer profit from that sort of consensus. Our common standards are reduced to the practical. But we are still accessible to a picture language that, half-shrouded in personal meanings, half-revealed by common sensation, can call upon us, distant thought the caller may be. --http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/deren9.html [Aug 2004]
Film als Kunst/Film As Art (1932) - Rudolf Arnheim
Film als Kunst/Film As Art (1932) - Rudolf Arnheim [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
This is a book of standards, a theory of film. The greater part of it is an adaptation of Film als Kunst, first published in 1932 in the original German and in English by Faber and Faber in 1933
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954) - Rudolf Arnheim
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954) - Rudolf Arnheim [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Product Description:
Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.
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