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WORK TITLE: Hanan al-Cinema
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
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NATIONALITY:
U.S. & Canadian dual citizen * http://www.sfu.ca/~lmarks/ * http://www.sfu.ca/~lmarks/styled-2/cv.html * http://www.sfu.ca/~lmarks/books/books.html * https://www.amazon.com/Laura-U.-Marks/e/B001KHWF4G
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 99031585
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n99031585
HEADING: Marks, Laura U., 1963-
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100 1_ |a Marks, Laura U., |d 1963-
670 __ |a The skin of the film, 1999: |b CIP t.p. (Laura U. Marks) data sheet (b. Sept. 14, 1963)
670 __ |a Hanan al-Cinema, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Laura U. Marks) data view (Dena Wosk University Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University; she is also the author of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MITP, 2010))
953 __ |a lg22
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Media theorist, curator, educator, and writer. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, associate professor in the School for Contemporary Arts, became Dena Wosk University Professor, became Grant Strate University Professor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
A media theorist, curator, and art professor, Laura U. Marks is interested in contemporary cinema in the Arab world. The author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks has curated programs of film, video, and new media for venues worldwide. In an interview for the Mind the … GAP*? Web site, Marks explained her interest in the Arab world’s art: “I started off just having a general interest in immigrant art and intercultural art. I have always been involved in pro-Arab activism. But as I learned more and more about Arab cultures, I started to feel a real attraction and stimulation to this part of the world and its history. And so it became less for political reasons and more for my own pleasure that I involved myself into the Arab world.”
Enfoldment and Infinity
Marks is also the author of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. The book compares classical Islamic art with contemporary computer and other new media art. In her interview for the Mind the … GAP*? Web site, prior to completion of Enfoldment and Infinity, Marks noted that in the book she would be “suggesting a sort of Islamic genealogy for new media art,” adding: “To show that computer art has these deep intercultural roots, and that not only is it not new, but it is not western. So I am hoping to make this kind of polemical argument, to be able to show how Islamic thought, Islamic aesthetics, philosophy, and theology can say interesting things about computer art.”
Marks draws from a wide range of discipines, including the performing arts, film and ephemeral installations, still images, and silver gelatin prints to show the incredible similarities, both visually and philosophically, between the two kinds of art. Marks is focused on more than a metaphorical comparison, as she shows hold modern and new media art have an “‘Islamic’ quality” that is latent and deeply enfolded. In the process she shows how historical Islamic art and thought are inextricably connected to new media art. “Reading Marks’s wide-ranging, provocative and elegant work, the reader may be convinced that she indeed demonstrates meaningful connections in the parallelism between the art and mathematics of digital media and that of Islamic Art,” noted Journal of Mathematics and the Arts contributor Carol Bier.
Hanan al-Cinema
In her next book, titled Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, Marks explores film and videos from the Arabic-speaking world. According to Marks, the region’s political, social, and historical circumstances have given rise to an urgency in society that translates to experimentation and invention in film and videos. According to Marks, the result is a cultural revival, or nahda, which sees artists going beyond political and economic limitations to express their ideas. Marks points out that these artists’ ideas have affected audiences and film and video makers around the world.
Hanan al-Cinema touches on a wide range of topics, from nostalgia for the radicalism of the seventies to the cinema of the body. Marks begins with a look at infrastructure issues for independent and experimental cinema in the region. She goes on to discuss the unfolding-enfolding of the past in films in the historical, personal, and national realms. The book ends with a chapter in which Marks focuses on her case that independent and experimental cinema from this region “operates through a perceptive connection between the body of the medium of film, the bodies of viewers, and the profilmic world,” as noted by a contributor to Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture. The contributor went on to note that Hanan al-Cinema “puts the readers into a bodily state of knowledge and encourages them to not only intellectually engage with the discussion of some of the most impressive works of independent and experimental cinema in contemporary era, but also to align their capacities with the possibilities of artistic experimentation and visionary freedom offered by these works.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, June-September, 2012, Carol Bier, review of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, pp. 137-139.
Millennium Film Journal, fall, 2015, Anthony Downey, review of Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, p. 67.
ONLINE
Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/ (May 25, 2016), review of Enfoldment and Infinity.
Jumpcut, https://www.ejumpcut.org/ (March 22, 2017), author profile.
Mind the … GAP*?, http://www.mindgap.org/ (March 22, 2017), “Introducing Laura U. Marks” and “Interview on Latency.”
Simon Fraser University Web site, http://www.sfu.ca/ (March 22, 2017), author profile.
Laura U. Marks is Dena Wosk University Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press).
Laura U. Marks
Laura Marks is currently researching an Islamic genealogy of new media art, as well as contemporary cinema in the Arab world. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2002) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), and has curated programs of film, video, and new media for venues around the world. Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. www.sfu.ca/~lmarks.
introducing Laura U. Marks
Laura U.Marks is a media theorist, curator and holds a position as Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
In 2000 she published The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000) and in 2002 Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002).
Related interests lead her into the research field thematically delineated by herself as Islamic Aesthetics, Attention, and the Abstract Line, the theme she also focused upon during her lecture at the conference ‘Sense and Sensation – On the Performativity of Perception’ in November 2004 at the FU Berlin, section ‘Kulturen des Performativen’. This following interview was conducted during the period of her stay in Berlin.
In the two published books The Skin of the Film (2000) and Touch (2002) Laura U.Marks explores her apprehension concerning the field of haptic visuality. Her research attempts to escape dominating theories of representation and interpretations of the ‘Gaze’ as derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis with one point of departure being Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the ‘smooth space’. Their understanding of the smooth as an element of the haptic space as a distinction between optical and haptic visuality can be achieved through the difference in the attitude of accessing space/territory. Thus the selected definition of this movement of access also defines the subject – object relation within the sensuous approach and consequently regulates it either into an embodied or disembodied perceptional experience.
These immanent facts of the analysis define the political impact inherent in any notion of vision and mark the difficulty of a simple neglecting critizism of either visual concept. In this sense focusing on haptic visuality(*) can be seen as the attempt to redefine notions of the visual field. Following the less recognizable image led Laura U. Marks’ research into the field of the more abstract visual pattern of embodied spectatorship. It is the missing flow between the haptic and the optical in the dominant culture of vision which stimulated this approach, but eventually might conclude on interestingly crucial and paradoxical overlappings within the underlying algorithmic patterns.
>>> interview
(*) ‘Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes‘, Frameworks 02/2004;
Kulturen des Performativen
Reviews of Laura U.Marks’ books:
Deleuzian Film Analysis: The Skin of the Film, Donato Totaro,
off screen, June 2002
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/skin.html
The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema, Melanie Swalwell,
Film Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 32, October 2002
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n32swalwell
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Melinda Barlow
Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4092/is_200310/ai_n9262975
This Time It’s Personal, Claire Perkins,
senses of cinema, September 2004
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/04/33/touch_laura_marks.html
Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image
Anthony Downey
Millennium Film Journal.
.62 (Fall 2015): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Post Typhoon Sky, Inc.
http://mfj-online.org/index.html
Full Text:
HANAN AL-CINEMA
Affections for the Moving Image
Laura U. Marks
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Engaging with the relatively new field of experimental cinema from the Arab world, Laura U. Marks has produced a readily accessible, acutely
observed, and carefully historicized account of a complex field of study that already feels seminal in its impact and insights."
--Anthony Downey, Editor-in-chief, Ibraaz
A Leonardo Book
Hardcover | $30 | 20.95[pounds sterling]
Downey, Anthony
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Downey, Anthony. "Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image." Millennium Film Journal, Fall 2015, p. 67. General OneFile,
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Published on May 25, 2016 Leave a comment
Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image
written by IVC Author
Reviewed by Najmeh Moradiyan Rizi, University of Kansas
Laura U. Marks. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Hardcover. 416 pp.
In recent decades Arab independent and experimental filmmakers have presented the world with some of the most distinctive artistic works through their various cinematic practices. The scholarly and close readings of these works, however, have remained less-studied. Laura U. Marks’s latest book, Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, is a singular contribution in this regard, providing a thorough analysis and a historically rich account of some of the experimental films and media arts coming from the Arab-speaking world. The significance of Marks’s study shows itself not only in the uniqueness of the subjects discussed, but also in its push of the notion of experimental beyond the medium of film to “low-end video formats to HD to mobile and online platforms” (2) in terms of materiality. This new perspective to moving images challenges the conventions of narrative in order to include “experimental narrative, essay films, [and] experimental documentary” (2) in terms of content. Through a comprehensive approach, grounded in affect theory, Marks thematically (and formally) highlights the particularities of Arab experimental cinema and media arts within political, social, cultural, economic, and historical contexts covering a time frame from the 1990s to 2014.
Marks argues that the modes of creativity found in the Arab experimental moving images resonate with a demand for exploration, perception, imagination, and feeling derived from “political pressures, fraught histories, divergent narratives, and competing notions of where the truth is founded and can be found” (4); perhaps in memory, in the archive, or in the body. This urge for experimentation and experience by the Arab filmmakers has created a new nahda (cultural revival) through which these artists, regardless of political and economic pressures and limitations, are creatively expressing their ideas of the world and their affections for the moving image, at the same time affecting audiences around the world.
The first chapter of Hanan al-Cinema provides a panoramic discussion of infrastructures of independent and experimental cinema in the Arab-speaking countries. In this regard, creative friendships such as “connections between individuals, loosely structured local collectives, alliances that become institutions, and international networks of financial support” (25) are the basic structural part through which the artistic practices are formed. Other aspects of Arab experimental cinema’s infrastructures include: heterogeneous models of funding through various personal, national, and international sources; independent trainings and workshops developing artists’ skills and visions; emergent local and transnational cultural houses and art institutions for supporting Arab independent and experimental artists inside and outside of their countries of origin; and diverse models of distribution through non-profit distributors, galleries, Internet, and television broadcasting. The variety and complexity of Arab experimental cinema’s infrastructures point to the fact that the cinematic nahda in the Arab-speaking world is not a systematically arranged movement. As Khaled D. Ramadan and Silke Schmicki write, “It is rather a colourful mosaic of individual statements, a diversification of points of view, [and] a playful association of ideas” (8).
This notion of diversity regarding the artistic expressions of Arab filmmakers is also reflected through the following chapters of the book. Instead of analyzing hundreds of films and videos in these chapters, Marks delineates the contours of the multiplicity of Arab film and media practices through the thematic essays such as “Communism, Dream Deferred,” “Asphalt Nomadism,” “Archival Romances,” and “Algorithm, Decryption, Glitch.” Also, a number of chapters exclusively focus on the works of some filmmakers, such as Elia Suleiman (Palestine), Mohamed Soueid (Lebanon), Hala Elkoussy (Egypt), and Mounir Fatmi (Morocco) in order to offer insightful introductions to these artists’ creative experimentations with moving images. Regardless of the multiplicity of creativity in Arab experimental cinema, the unfolding-enfolding aesthetics, deployed by the filmmakers, connects the diverse range of artistic representations. This aesthetics, proposed by Marks in her earlier book—Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010)—is inspired by “Foucault, Deleuze, and Isma’ili Shi’ite thought” (183) and consists of three levels of experience (infinite), information, and image. This threefold connection, as Marks postulates, can be particularly useful in the reading of many artworks that discuss or represent some aspects of history and the past. “The vast majority of experience lies latent. Few images ever arise from it. In our age, those that do arise tend to be selected, or unfolded, by political and economic interests that deem them to be useful as information” (69). Yet, this particular unfolding of the past through information and image may again “slip back into the enfolded thickness of the experience” (71) and be forgotten or hidden from public imagery.
The unfolding-enfolding aesthetics allows Arab independent and experimental filmmakers to un/enfold the past, particularly the historical, personal, and national ruptures and erasures. For instance, as Gaza 36mm (2012), directed by Khalil al-Mozian, depicts, many movie theaters have been destroyed or closed in Palestine due to Israel’s attacks as well as Islamist groups’ negation of cinema. Yet, the retrieval of the images of the glorious cinema days in Gaza in the film occurs through the exploration of destroyed movie places and even the enactment or staging of films that do not exist but their posters are created by the director’s collaborators, Mohammed and Ahmad Abu Nasser (better known as Tarzan and Arab), such as Fields of Thorns. As Marks asserts, “Gaza 36mm, like other movies about movie houses, deploys all the tools of memory, imagination, research, and performance with love and persistence in order to unfold images from the shadow archive” (198). In another example, Mounir Fatmi’s artworks and films, such as Arabesque: hommage à Jackson Pollock (1997) and Technologia (2010), attempt at enfolding the past or information through the symbolic use of images and the employment of techniques such as calligraphy, animated forms and letters, and diagrams in order to “draw creative power from a rejection of figurative images” (231).
Laura U. Marks concludes the book with a chapter titled, “What Can a Body Do?,” in which she argues that Arab independent and experimental cinema operates through a perceptive connection between the body of the medium of film, the bodies of viewers, and the profilmic world. This sensuous interaction creates a haptic vision that resonates throughout Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image itself. The book puts the readers into a bodily state of knowledge and encourages them to not only intellectually engage with the discussion of some of the most impressive works of independent and experimental cinema in contemporary era, but also to align their capacities with the possibilities of artistic experimentation and visionary freedom offered by these works.
FILED UNDER: Current Issue, Issue 24, Reviews