Alexander Rodchenko was an artist, photographer, graphic designer, and close associate of Dziga Vertov's in the early 1920s. His photographs – with their emphasis on unusual angles (high, low, overhead) – are striking examples of art-as-defamiliarization. By saying this though we should not mistake the strategies at work in Rodchenko, or Vertov, as universal or a-historical modes of defamiliarization. The truth is that as we become accustomed to certain styles of art – including Rodchenko's use of unexpected angles or Vertov's hyper-montage – they too can become another convention, another stereotype. So the artist today cannot simply imitate previous models, however striking or memorable. Each artist must work with and against the conventions of his or her day and discover new ways of making the world less familiar or predictable. (This, it seems to me, is exactly what we find in a modern filmmaker like Michael Haneke who uses long takes and sequence shots to create a "resistant-image", an image that resists the spectator's desire to quickly consume images as little bits of knowable – and disposable – information. Haneke wants instead to create an image that gives one pause, to become less certain we understand what has been placed in front of us. Instead of moving on to the next image, we are made to return to this one and, by doing so, seeing something else in it. In contemporary cinema, the long take becomes one mode of "making strange.")
S I-G
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