Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de ce mémoire a été dépouillée de ses documents visuels. La version intégrale du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal. / Privilégiant une approche généalogique et intertextuelle, cette étude interroge le dispositif du plan-séquence fixe à travers ses moments phares dans l’histoire du cinéma et démontre que son usage vise autant à renouer avec le cinéma des premiers temps qu’à poursuivre les préoccupations des cinéastes expérimentaux. Chez Andy Warhol, le plan-séquence fixe s’inscrit dans un rapport de redécouverte et d’enchantement du cinéma des premiers temps. Avec Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman prolonge les traits du modernisme bazinien et de l’avant-garde new-yorkaise. Avec l’avènement de la vidéosurveillance, il se transforme en une esthétique carcérale qui pose dès lors des problèmes éthiques et esthétiques (voyeurisme, degré zéro de la mise en scène, etc.), questionnés dans les documentaires News from Home et Délits flagrants. Forme commune et majeure dans le cinéma d’auteur contemporain de même que dans la culture populaire et amateur (web film, série télé, etc.), le plan-séquence fixe permet d’analyser un ensemble de pratiques et de réalités du cinéma, de l’usine Lumière à YouTube. / Favouring an approach at once genealogical and intertextual, this study explores the practice of the "static sequence shot" (plan-séquence caméra fixe) in cinema. It offers an overview of its significant moments in film history. It tries to show how its use since the 70's can be seen as a reappraisal of early cinema technique, and can also find strong echos in the works of experimental filmmakers, in particular structural filmmaking. For Andy Warhol, the static sequence shot was both a rediscovery and an enchantment of early cinema. In Jeanne Dielman Chantal Akerman's static shots extended Bazinian Modernism into the New York Avant-garde. Since the 80's, with the advent of video surveillance, the static sequence shot becomes associated with a carceral apparatus, posing ethical and aesthetic issues (voyeurism, degree zero mechanisms, etc.). These issues are at the core of the documentary films News from Home and Délits flagrants. Today, we can witness that the static sequence shot has become increasingly important and almost dominant in certain branches of auteur cinema as well as in contemporary popular media culture (web films, T.V. series, etc.) This master's thesis thus claims it allows us to analyse current as well as early practices of cinema, from the Lumière' s factory to YouTube.

This thesis document serves as a support paper for my exhibition titled, Selected Work. The goal of this document is to present and discuss a set of ideas and interests as they pertain to my studio practice and thesis project in particular, and to contemporary (ie. current) art practices in general. In this document I examine selected works from Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Andy Kaufman, Maurizio Cattelan and Richard Prince. Through the exploration of these artists and their works, I begin by examining the object and the conditions that give it approval as an art object. Using these conditions, I examine the effect that experience has on the object. This support paper will serve as a glossary of terms and theoretical concerns relevant to my thesis exhibition / vi, 64 leaves : col. ill. ; 29 cm

Privilégiant une approche généalogique et intertextuelle, cette étude interroge le dispositif du plan-séquence fixe à travers ses moments phares dans l’histoire du cinéma et démontre que son usage vise autant à renouer avec le cinéma des premiers temps qu’à poursuivre les préoccupations des cinéastes expérimentaux. Chez Andy Warhol, le plan-séquence fixe s’inscrit dans un rapport de redécouverte et d’enchantement du cinéma des premiers temps. Avec Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman prolonge les traits du modernisme bazinien et de l’avant-garde new-yorkaise. Avec l’avènement de la vidéosurveillance, il se transforme en une esthétique carcérale qui pose dès lors des problèmes éthiques et esthétiques (voyeurisme, degré zéro de la mise en scène, etc.), questionnés dans les documentaires News from Home et Délits flagrants. Forme commune et majeure dans le cinéma d’auteur contemporain de même que dans la culture populaire et amateur (web film, série télé, etc.), le plan-séquence fixe permet d’analyser un ensemble de pratiques et de réalités du cinéma, de l’usine Lumière à YouTube. / Favouring an approach at once genealogical and intertextual, this study explores the practice of the "static sequence shot" (plan-séquence caméra fixe) in cinema. It offers an overview of its significant moments in film history. It tries to show how its use since the 70's can be seen as a reappraisal of early cinema technique, and can also find strong echos in the works of experimental filmmakers, in particular structural filmmaking. For Andy Warhol, the static sequence shot was both a rediscovery and an enchantment of early cinema. In Jeanne Dielman Chantal Akerman's static shots extended Bazinian Modernism into the New York Avant-garde. Since the 80's, with the advent of video surveillance, the static sequence shot becomes associated with a carceral apparatus, posing ethical and aesthetic issues (voyeurism, degree zero mechanisms, etc.). These issues are at the core of the documentary films News from Home and Délits flagrants. Today, we can witness that the static sequence shot has become increasingly important and almost dominant in certain branches of auteur cinema as well as in contemporary popular media culture (web films, T.V. series, etc.) This master's thesis thus claims it allows us to analyse current as well as early practices of cinema, from the Lumière' s factory to YouTube. / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de ce mémoire a été dépouillée de ses documents visuels. La version intégrale du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Ceramics has always existed on the fringes of craft and high art. The purpose of this thesis project is to elevate clay beyond the traditions of craft by examining the historical use of clay and the everyday object. My research looks specifically at works by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Jasper Johns in order to examine the origin of displaying the massproduced object and reflecting upon it’s validity as high status art object. In this project I am also interested in infrastructural systems within modern architecture-- plumbing, wiring, heat ducts vents-- with a specific focus on systems lurking inside walls and how these function to influence architectural space. With the advent of modern plumbing, concealing these elements was adopted as the new standard and still exists today. Through the presentation of defamiliarized handmade objects, my exhibition presents the appearance of manufactured material through the serial manipulation of scale, surface and quantity. The result reveals a clay piece that renders the material unrecognizable providing the viewer with a new view on the object's tradition. / v, 47 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

This thesis examines works of theatre and film that explore a refusal of acting. Acting has traditionally been considered as something false or as pretending, in opposition to everyday life, which has been considered as something real and truthful. This has resulted in a desire to refuse acting, evident in the tradition of the anti-theatrical prejudice where acting is considered to be seductive and dangerous. All the works that I examine in this thesis are relatively recent and all of them explore the paradox that in our (postmodern) times a gradual reversal has occurred where everyday life is seen as more and more false or as pretending or simulating (ie. containing acting and theatricality) and conversely, acting in theatre and film has become the place where people have begun searching for reality and truth and where ‘acting’ and pretending in life can be revealed and refused. The result of this paradox - and what I also discuss as a confusion of acting and living - is that the place in which acting can be refused has shifted; the ethical desire to refuse acting (in theatre and in life) is turning up in the aesthetic domain of acting itself. In my first chapter I study works by filmmaker István Szabó and playwright Werner Fritsch, who represent the desire to refuse acting in the context of fascism where theatrical and filmic spectacle was used by the Nazis to seduce the population and where actors during this period also experienced an inability to separate their political and artistic lives. In my second chapter I look at the way Genet’s The Balcony and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution explore the desire to refuse acting as a result of a confusion of acting and living in the context of sexual (sadomasochistic) role-play. And in my third chapter I examine the way Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, von Trier’s The Idiots and Affleck’s I’m Still Here represent a refusal of acting and theatricality altogether, responding to the way that ‘acting’ in life may have become an all-pervasive substitute (a simulation) for living. Foundational to the development of this thesis and a major source of material is my analysis of three theatrical productions with Free Theatre Christchurch, directed by Peter Falkenberg, in which I was involved as an actor and in which a refusal of acting was explored.

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