Line Light: The Geometric Cinema of Anthony McCall*

PHILIPPE-ALAIN MICHAUD
Line Describing a Cone (1973), the first of Anthony McCalls geometric films, has recently reawakened keen interest. In 2001, it appeared in the Whitney Museum of American Arts exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 19641977, curated by Chrissie Iles. In 2003, October published a group of texts on The Projected Image in American Art of the 1960s and 1970s, including the lecture delivered by McCall during the Whitneys exhibition. Since then, discussion of this artist/filmmakers work has steadily increased.1 The revival of interest can be seen as the effect of filmmakings migration toward the art world, a movement for which McCalls film stands as an emblematic prefiguration, indeed as a totemic one. Over the last three decades, Line Describing a Cone has, in fact, been presented in contexts of both the art scene and the filmic avant-garde, demonstrating that it has provided a bridge between two worlds until then quite severed from each other. Procedure Line Describing a Cone , conceived in Januar y 1973, t wo days out of Southampton during McCalls journey by boat from England to the States, was made in New York in August of that year for one hundred dollars. In 2002, during a retrospective devoted to the history of the London Film-Makers Co-op, to which his cinema has been closely linked, he stated: Once I really started working with film and feeling I was making films, making works of media, it seemed to me a completely natural thing to come back and back and back, to come more away from a pro-filmic event and into the process of filmmaking itself. And at the time it all boiled down to some very simple questions. In my case, and perhaps in
* A version of this essay appeared in Cahiers du Muse national dart moderne 93 (Fall 2003), pp. 7889. 1. Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone and Related Films, October 103 (Winter 2003), pp. 4262. See The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, a roundtable discussion with McCall, George Baker, Matthew Buckingham, Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, and Malcolm Turvey, in October 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 7196. See also Anthony McCall, Film Installations, exh. cat. (Warwick: Mead Gallery, 2004); and Christopher Eamon, ed., The Solid Light Films and Related Works (Evanston: Northwestern University, 2005). OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 322. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

OCTOBER

others, the question being something like What would a film be if it was only a film? Carolee Schneemann and I sailed on the SS Canberra from Southampton to New York in 1973, and when we embarked, all I had was that question. When I disembarked I already had the plan for Line Describing a Cone fully-fledged in my notebook. You could say it was a mid-Atlantic film! Its been the story of my life ever since, of course, where Im located, where my interests are, that business of Am I English or am I Amer ican? So that was when I conceived Line Describing a Cone and then I made it in the months that followed.2 For McCall, Line is a narrative film of conventional structure: a long progression toward a climax followed by a sudden denouement that coincides with the end of the piece. Shot as an animation, one frame at a time, Line shows the gradual forming of a white circle on a black background. The circle being photographed had been drawn on a sheet of black paper using white gouache, ruling-pen, and compass.3 The film is to be projected, not in a theater but in an exhibition space that is closed off, homogeneous, non-hierarchized, and level, with no separation between projection space and spectators, no rows of chairs, and, above all, no screen. An essential point: mist is diffused throughout the projection, so that the image of the circle projected on the screens surface is replaced by the projectors light beam, which takes on a material consistency.4 The film shows the formation of a geometrical body in space caused by the projection of a simple light beam, and insofar as it becomes a narrative, it is the visual narrative of this materialization. According to McCall, the ideal length of the beam (the distance between projector and surface of projection, or between the light source and the beams plane of intersection) is between thirty and fifty feet, with the diameter of the circle on the wall being between seven and nine feet, and the base of the circle about twelve inches from the ground. A spectator with raised arms, standing inside the cone and against the wall on which the circle is projected, is unable to touch the surface of the cone. If one walks towards the light source, the membrane of light gradually diminishes in size until one emerges out of it. As one reaches the projector, it is possible to see the ribbon of filmstock passing behind the lens, and on it the circles tiny image, the bi-dimensional image that is the source of the tri-dimensional one.5
2. McCall, interview with Mark Webber, 2001, quoted in Shoot, Shoot, Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers Cooperative and British Avant-Garde Film, 19661976, unpublished broadsheet, 2002, distributed by London Film-Makers Cooperative in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition that opened at Tate Modern in May 2002. 3. The prints for projection, which display the same relation of black background and white line, are inter-negatives. 4. From 1972 to 1974, McCall created a series of pyrotechnic pieces, starting with Landscape for Fire I, presented in England, the United States, and Sweden. Line is their luminescent extension. These were outdoor installations based on grids defined by small containers of inflammable liquid. Following a precise score, the fires were lit in a specific order to create shifting configurations within the grid. 5. One finds the same concern with the volumetric display of projection in Take Measure (made in 1973, the same year as Line) by William Raban, a major figure in the British school of Structural work. The filmstrip, whose length coincides exactly with that of the projection space, is unwound

Anthony McCall. Line Describing a Cone. 1973. Installation view during the twenty-fourth minute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002. Photograph by Hank Graber.

McCall. Line Describing a Cone. 1973. Installation view during the twenty-fourth minute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002. Photograph by Hank Graber.

Line Light

The spectator turns from the screen to catch sight of the light source; this turn is prefigured in a slide work of 1972, Miniature in Black & White, in which a series of slides pass repeatedly before a projector lens, showing tiny plants pasted between two pieces of transparent glass in alternation with sections of black leader, lines, scratches, and sprocket holes. The slides are projected onto a tiny screen immediately in front of the projector lens. The spectator is invited to stand close to the screen, in effect looking directly into the light, thereby experiencing projection optically in its pure state, an experience of which Line will be both the expansion and the reversal. Although the films construction is wholly the product of calculation, one parameter of an aleatoric kind does persist in projection. In 1974, during a joint screening by New Yorks Collective for Living Cinema and Film Forum in a high-ceilinged 100by50 foot space, for approximately 120 spectators and with a projector equipped with a very powerful xenon bulb, the circle produced was about three meters high and McCall says he had the impression of seeing the film for the first time. It had nothing to do with the work Id conceived.7 For the first projections, McCall counted on the dust-filled air of New York lofts, and he mentions projections of Line organized with simple incense sticks or in the presence of cigarette-smoking spectators. With the rising cult of the clean and healthy, dust disappeared from lofts along with the art lovers tobacco. Projections of Line are now done with theatrical mist machines. Having seen this as a distortion of the initial project, McCall came to consider the set-up as a possible non-narrative version of the film, with neither beginning nor end, thus transforming the course of action into a formal statement. Geometry In a note written for the Knokke-le-Zoute Festival of 1974, McCall wrote, Line Describing a Cone is what I term a solid light film. It deals with the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface.8 With McCalls film, the space of conventional cinemawhich is based on the traditional theaters separation of spectator from performance and constructed according to an ideal, single, fixed point of viewcomes apart. That configuration, the traditional design of the theater dominant throughout the t went ieth centur y, depends on the forgett ing of the phenomenon of projection: the screen functions as a window within which an illusionist spatial perspectivea fictive spaceis reconstituted. For the perspectival space of conventional cinema, McCall substitutes a projective space. The wall no longer opens out as a transparent window, but appears as an opaque surface and as a limit. Line even develops as the inversion of the perspectival set-up insofar as the
between the screen and the projector. When the latter starts up, the film reel leaves the screens surface, to be restored, by an inverse symmetrical movement, in a luminous form. 6. In reminiscence of Stan Brakhages Mothlight, made in 1963. 7. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), p. 162. 8. McCall, Line Describing a Cone and Related Films, p. 43.

OCTOBER

cones apex no longer coincides with the vanishing point on the horizon line behind the screen but rather with the source of the light beam formed in the projectors lens.9 In overturning the fictive depth beyond the screen and directing it toward the real depth that unfolds beyond it, Line opens filmic experience to tri-dimensionality.10 From now on, film is no longer that projected image hollowing out a semblance of depth within the walls surface but a field truly formed by and merged with the projection itself. In this way, the light beams inscribed within McCalls mist develop films real plastic properties, crossing the frontiers of film history. In so doing, they emerge, like Dan Flavins color fields or Fred Sandbacks colored strings of cotton, stretched out through space, as modulations of the space within which they fan out. In 1974, with the base provided by Line, McCall conceived and executed a series of filmic variations on the geometrical figure of the conePartial Cone, Conical Solid, and Cone of a Variable Volumein which the deconstruction of cinematic expression initiated by Line was extended. Partial Cone explores the textural modulations of the light beamof solid to glimmering, flickering, and flashingobtained by the insertion of an increased number of black frames between the areas of pure light. In Conical Solid, a flat light beam revolves around a fixed central axis. Cone of a Variable Volume is the registration of the conical module phenomenon of accelerating expansion and concentration. For the latter film, the circle was drawn prior to filming, with the animation obtained by the cameras withdrawal from and approach to the previously drawn circle. The three Cone films revisit, in simple form, a specific property of the original cone of which they form the analytic decomposition. The following geometrical films will, on the other hand, represent an enlargement of the set-up. Long Film for Four Projectors (1974), later shown at Documenta 6 (1977), thus seems like an expansion of Line. The installation is composed of four projectors. Spectators circulate within a vast, mist-filled, rectangular space with four intersecting light beams forming arcs of ninety degrees; the presentation of the volumetric object (Lines cone) is transformed into an environment. The spectator is now inside the film, no longer conceived as a circumscribed form within a predefined space but as the very field within which the experience takes shape. The film, with a running time of six hours, is composed of forty-five-minute modules in eight permutations, so as to include all possible combinations of the four movements. In 1975, McCall made Four Projected Movements, which, like Lines three geometrical sequels, appears as the analytic decomposition of Long Film for Four Projectors. This is a piece for a single projector
9. This reversal coincides with antiquitys construction of the visual cone of geometrical perspective. According to this hypothesis of Pythagorean origin, the visual beam cast by the eye travels in a straight line to strike the object of the gaze. This model made it possible to trace a visual cone with its summit at the eyes center and its base at the pupil, to determine the visual field and to draw the angle at which the object was seen. Grard Simon, Archologie de la vision: Loptique, le corps, la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 18. 10. The techniques of 3-D that develop in the commercial cinema from the 1950s onward are based, however, on a fictive dissolving of the boundary between what is within the screen and what is beyond it.

Line Light

installed in a corner of a rectangular space. A fifteen-minute reel emits a beam of light that describes an arc of ninety degrees. The film (16mm with double perforation) is loaded four times in the projector: from beginning to end, from end to beginning, from beginning to end and backwards, and from end to beginning and backwards. The effect as planned is the sensation of four successive displacements: from wall to floor, from ceiling to wall, from wall to floor, and from ceiling to wall. The Four Projected Movements do not, however, form a closed deductive system any more so than Sol LeWitts 122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) are reducible to a demonstration of a logical sort. In McCalls piece, the accent is no longer on the projected image, nor even on the phenomenon of projection, but on the gesture of projection and, as in 122 Variations, on the exhaustion of possibilities.11
11. In this connection, see Rosalind Krausss description of the LeWitt piece in terms of the parable of the pebbles developed by Samuel Beckett in Molloy, LeWitt in Progress, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). On the Beckett-like combinatorial see The Exhausted, in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18.

McCall. Installation drawing for Long Film for Four Projectors. 1977.

McCall. Installation drawings for Four Projected Movements. 1975.

12

OCTOBER

Long Film for Ambient Light, the last of McCalls geometrical films, created in June 1975 at the Idea Warehouse, is the most radical as well. Its running time is twenty-four hours. The gallerys windows are covered with white paper, through which daylight can pass; at night, the light from a bulb hanging from the ceiling is refracted on the sheets of paper, which are thereby transformed into screens.12 The spectators are free to come and go and, above all, to return, so as to take account of the slow changes of light that represent the entire filmic event. All elements of the filmic spectacle (projector, screen, film strip, and even spectator) have disappeared; light and duration remain.

Astronomy At the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, in describing the reversal of perspective involved in the critical method, uses the term Copernican Revolution; this is directed at substituting, for the immediacy of the object within the process of knowledge, the examination of those faculties of the subject by which that process is conditioned. Line and its sequels present, similarly, a critical reversal of films progress from projected image to the projective mechanism itself.13 The discovery of Lines principle mid-Atlantic, in the middle of nowhere,
12. In 1966, Malcolm Le Grice had offered in Castle 1 the same type of deconstruction of the cinematic experience by hanging, along the screens side, a lightbulb that flashed on and off during the projection. 13. Nol Burch refers to a projection setup at the beginning of Japanese cinema in which the spectators benches were placed not facing the screen but along the ray of light. McCalls piece would thus present a trace of this original fascination with the projective event as such, with the projected image as merely its residual trace. See Nol Burch, To the Distant Observer: Towards a Theory of Japanese Film, October 1 (Spring 1976), p. 36.

McCall. Long Film for Ambient Light. 1975. Installation view, Idea Warehouse, New York.

Line Light

13

McCall. Announcement for Line Describing a Cone. 1974.

thus appears as a kind of dramatization of the account in the Transcendental Aesthetic in which Kant describes the a priori forms of the sensible that condition the subjects apprehension of phenomena: a reduction of the cinematic to its ultimate spatio-temporal elements. Line Describing a Cone is not, however, a Copernican Revolution merely in Kants metaphorical sense, an inversion of the filmic experience for the elucidation of its formal properties; it is a literal reproduction, as well. We know that Copernicuss publication of De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (Venice, 1543) marked heliocentrisms replacement of geocentrism, which would end with Galileo and the mathematization of physics. The result was a series of epistemological reversals, such as the following: The finite, concrete space of medieval physics becomes an abstract space, homogeneous, potentially infinite. The cosmos conceived as a hierarchized space is dissolved. Mans place in the universe is relativized. Finally, in pre-Galilean physics, movement is defined not from the point and instant of departure and the speed of the moving object but rather from the place of arrival and the end toward which the object is directed by a sort of appetite. From now on, end product no longer counts as the cause and explanatory principle of movement. It is precisely this that transpires in McCalls film, on the reduced scale of the cosmos formed by the gallerys white cube transformed into a black box. The displacement of emphasis from the projected image toward the projection phenomenon results in the following: The geometricization of space: the gallerys homogeneous and omnidirectional space replaces the cinemas heterogeneous space, formed as it is by different, qualitatively distinct places (screen, theater, projection booth). The relativization of the spectator, who is now deprived of a fixed, stable

14

OCTOBER

point of reference, the reappraisal of the unidirectional point of view and of the monodirectional point of view. The reappraisal of finality in the cinematographic experience; it is no longer the image projected onscreen (in other words, the final cause) that defines cinema but the projection phenomenon, whose reception surface only marks the end.14 In an interview by Scott McDonald, published in 1992, McCall stated: I had begun to think about the possibility of making a film that would be only film. What were its irreducible elements? My interest in the question was certainly awakened by Peter Gidals texts on Andy Warhol. Most questions during the 1970s revolved around the notion of process and the mediums possibilities as such.15 Line Describing a Cone seems, at first glance, to conform to the principles of Greenbergian essentialism: It returns cinema to the clarification of its own elements (the projection phenomenon). It has a performative dimension, which is explicit in its title: the description of the cone is immediately identical with its realization, so that the aesthetic and theoretical spaces converge; it is this convergence that produces the films specific perceptual effect. The film in question is strictly anti-illusionist, replacing or substituting an effect of real spatialization for a fictive depth. Process replaces exposition of the completed form, and completion of the form thus indicates completion of the piece. The film, self-referential, devoid of incident, is based on a simple geometric progression; it is wholly calculable, since the process is merely the realization of its premises. It is based on a principle of economy (a minimum of means for maximum effect). Finally, it is wholly devoid of reflexivity, its effective source disappearing, replaced by the exposition of process. The film does nevertheless retain something indefinable or nonspecific in its very structure, and McCall has stated that he sees in Line an intermediate state between film and sculpture. The lights lack of consistency and quality, the presence of movement, and the unfolding of the spectacle in the dark are all closely related to cinema. The tri-dimensionality and spatialization, on the other hand, suggest the sculptural. Now, this ambiguity between film and sculpture is the effect of two displacements, the first of which is evident and the other
14. Paul Sharits compares the definalization induced by projection of films on a wall with no screen to Carl Andres gesture. See UR(i)N(ul)LS . . . , in Film Culture 65/66 (1978), p. 11. 15. McCall, quoted in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2, p. 160.

Line Light

15

more discreet. They show that Line is not reducible to the elucidation of its formal properties. They demonstrate that even through an attempt to reach its limitreduced, as it were, to it s irreducible element s the nature of the medium does not change as a result of what Aristotle calls generic alteration (metabasis eis allo genos). As evidence, there is the light cones appearance conditioned by the diffusion of the smoke; in other words, the cones appearance is only a reaction to the surroundings; seen thus, the thin beam of light becomes a kind of blade that gradually cuts into the opaque mass of smoke. And when, in 1975, at 2729, rue Beaubourg, Gordon Matta-Clark, in Conical Intersect, a piece conceived in tribute to McCalls film, makes, on the site of the future Pompidou Center, a gigantic cut into a building marked for demolition, he will incidentally reveal the sculptural properties of the filmmakers piece.16 However, this first operation masks a second, more discrete one; the films volumetric effect is conditioned by the lights persistence. Each light eventthat is, each stage of progression along the circles curveis retained, as against the effect of classical projection in which the emission of light is diachronic and ephemeral (the images replace each other). We can therefore form the following hypothesis: when succession is returned to simultaneity, the film changes into sculpture. Paul Sharitss investigations of the shutters optical materialization, as displayed in the installation Shutter Interface (1975), cast new light on the activation of the cone employed in Line. On the wall of a gallery plunged into darkness, a horizontal band of seven partially superimposed rectangles of pure color flash on and off in arithmetically determined combinations. The illusion of the perception of the shutter (that is, the mechanical operation that determines the perception of movement) is obtained through the insertion of a black frame between the areas of color formed by film frames from two to ten in number. Each area of color, followed by black, is perceived as separate, as if it consisted of only one frame. For Sharits, just as for McCall, the point is not to produce the mechanical phenomenon of the shutters action but to dramatize it; it is not about the phenomenological reduction of the cinematic projection, but its reconstruction. And since Line reconstructs rather than deconstructs the projection phenomenon, it opens onto a new form of theatricality.17
16. In 1998, Pierre Huyghe, in Light Conical Intersect, will cover Matta-Clarks film with McCalls by projecting on the wall of the building in the neighborhood of the Clock (the site of Matta-Clarks intervention) an image of Conical Intersect taken at the moment of the lights permeation of the conical cavity made in the faade; in a perfect visual coincidence, the architectural system is resolved into light, thus returning to its origin. 17. McCall claims to have recognized a precedent for his geometric films in HPSCHD (1968), an installation by John Cage in which seven harpsichordists, seated in a circle, play different scores. The sonic chaos is transformed and decomposes in response to the auditors movement around the musicians. Talking of HPSCHD, Cage stated, In each case its a question of developing a form of theater without depending on a text, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981), p. 166; cited by McCall in October 103, p. 60.

16

OCTOBER

This page: Bruce Nauman. Preparatory drawing for Cones/Cojones. 1974. 2001 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Next page: Sandro Botticelli. Map of Hell. 148090.

Cosmology In 1975, Bruce Nauman showed Cones/Cojones at the Castelli Gallery.18 A series of concentric circles made of adhesive tape, applied to the gallerys floor, suggested a cut in large interlocking cones running vertically downward ad infinitum. Spectators standing in the drawings center found themselves sucked into a negative structure recalling that of Dantes Inferno, which Botticelli, in a series of illustrations for The Divine Comedy, represented as an inverse cone. McCalls cone, unlike Naumans, does not refer to a metaphysical experience but to a geometrical-astronomical theme of Platonic origin: the circles derivation from the line and that of the cone from the circle. Circular movement is more perfect than rectilinear movement, which has no end. The simple body that changes into a circle is thus a perfect body. Within the nonspecific exhibition space, McCall organizes the construction of a body that is simultaneously geometrical and astral, redefining the conditions of classical projection to reset it, with its archaic connotations drawn from the physics of antiquity. Nevertheless, on noticing the space taken by the lights inscription, one realizes that Lines construction is impure. First, because some points of light are omit18. Chrissie Iles cites Naumans work without, however, referring to McCalls in the exhibition catalogue for Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 19641977 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), p. 65.

Line Light

17

ted within the circle as its tracing progresses, and second, because at the films end, at the point where the circles two halves join, they dont quite fit together. This imperfection of the tracing (due, according to McCall, only to strictly material conditions), although not essential to the intended purpose, has at least the effect of inscribing the circle within perception, of realizing it. Beyond its geometrical-cosmic construction, Line makes visible the real inscription of a form within matter. Solid Light means that the experience of light is an experience of a material sort, similar to those described by Lucretius on observing the movement of dust particles within a sun ray: Observe whenever the rays are let in and pour the sunlight through the dark chambers of houses; you will see many minute bodies in many ways through the apparent void mingle in the midst of the light of the rays, and as in never-ending conflict, skirmish and give battle, combating in troops and never halting, driven about in frequent meetings and partings . . . so that you may guess from this what it is for first beginnings of things to be ever tossing about in the

18

OCTOBER

great void . . . a small thing may give an illustration of great things and put you on the track of knowledge.19 The experience of projection is a physical, tactile one, in which the body, not only the gaze, is involved. Solicited to pass through the light ray and to remain within it, the spectator is activated; she becomes an actor. Through the physical experience of the light, she is transformed into fictioninto vision, as Plotinus would have it. In the Enneads, V.8 (On Intelligible Beauty), in his description of the beauty (over) there or (in) the land of souls and of the gods, Plotinus writes: For all there sheds radiance, and floods those that have found their way thither so that they too become beautiful: thus it will often happen that men climbing heights where the soil has taken a yellow glow will themselves appear so, borrowing color from the place on which they move.20 On entering the light ray, with his body suddenly snatched from the dark, the spectators faculties of viewing, vision, and the visible are conjoined, and this penetration of the silky, golden-brown web is not wholly without sensual connotations. In On Leaving the Movie Theater (1975), Roland Barthes stressed the erotic properties of the projections light ray, and one has the impression of reencountering, in his description of an ordinary film screening, the experience McCall tried to arouse in Line. In that opaque cube, one light: the film, the screen? Yes, of course. But also (especially?), visible and unperceived, that dancing cone which pierces the darkness like a laser beam. This beam is minted, according to the rotation of its particles, into changing figures; we turn our face toward the currency of a gleaming vibration whose imperious jet brushes our skull, glancing off someones hair, someones face. As in the old hypnotic experiments, we are fascinatedwithout seeing it head-on by this site, motionless and dancing.21 But why the eruption, in Barthes text, of this strange monetary metaphor, as seemingly incongruous as the cojones attached to Naumans cones? Probably because the light ray bathes the bodies and faces of the spectators, which are otherwise plunged in shadow, like Titians shower of gold falling upon Danaes body in a luminous shaft. McCalls film thus offers a singular response to the questions of matter, fixation, and transcription of light that traverse the history of art. The analytic
19. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Eselen (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1995), p. 60. 20. Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York: Larson Publications, 1992), p. 494. 21. Roland Barthes, Leaving the Movie Theater, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 347; cited by Chrissie Iles, Into the Light, p. 45. The same erotic metaphor of projection appears in the opening pages of Jean Genets Pompes funbres (1947).

Line Light

19

reduction to its basic components of the cinematic setup in Line Describing a Cone is a fictive one; in the last analysis, it opens onto a mythological scenario. Apostil At the turn of the century, after twenty years of silence, when presentations of Solid Light Films were increasingly frequent in both the United States and in Europe, Anthony McCall inaugurated a new series of works produced not on film but digitally, since the computer facilitated the tracing of complex lines and the exploration of the plastic properties of curves. While the geometric pieces of the 1970s were based on a principle of equivalence between line and plane, from 2000 on, the post-geometric pieces played on the forms reversibility, on exchanges between interior and exterior, and the equivalence of horizontal and vertical vectors. At the same time, the adoption, from 2000 on, of mist-producing machines generated a texture both uniform and largerscaled, so that McCall was able to increase the scale of his pieces, conceived from then on as installations and projected in continuous cycles.

McCall. Doubling Back. 2003. Installation view, Muse de Rochechouart.

20

OCTOBER

McCall. Doubling Back. 2003. Installation drawings.

Doubling Back (2003), the first of this new series of films, based on a principle of equivalence between inner and outer surfaces, is made of two waves that slowly fuse and separate, in fifteen-minute cycles. Turning Under (2004) links the interaction of a wave and a plane of light to a rotary movement of ninety degrees. Between You and I (2006)along with its variation, You and I, Horizontal, McCalls most complex and monumental piece at that pointis composed of two adjacent vertical forms of solid light, each thirty feet high projected from ceiling to ground, and each formed from a traveling wave passing through a rotating plane of light and an elliptical cone in slow contraction and expansion. Gradually, each of the two light sculptures inverts its formal qualities so that it is transformed into the other. The transformation is realized using the Wipe, a conventional technique in feature films, no longer in frequent use, but given a new formal application in this work. However, the Wipe is ordinarily used for transitions from one sequence or shot to another and lasts only one or two seconds. In Between You and I, inordinately slowed down, it lasts sixteen minutes. The two shapes are never wholly visible in any given instant, but during the Wipe, that which is invisible within one form becomes visible in the other, so that at any given moment, everything is wholly present. In the chapter of The Analysis of Beauty that is devoted to line, William Hogarth proposed a consideration of the surfaces of objects as so many shells composed of lines closely stuck together. Such is the precise effect of Anthony

McCall. Between You and I. 2006. Installation view at Peer/The Round Chapel, London.

22

OCTOBER

McCall. Between You and I. 2006.

McCalls first geometric films: a production of surfaces through an arrangement of lines developing in time. When dealing with the waving linealso called the line of beauty or serpentine linethat appears to be formed by two contrasting curves, Hogarth says that because of its complexity, it cant be reproduced on paper without the assistance of the imagination or the help of a figure, and he chooses to represent it in the form of a fine wire properly twisted around the elegant and varied form of a cone.22 In his recent installations, with digital calculation replacing the work of the imagination, Anthony McCall intuitively rediscovers Hogarths lesson; his digitally drawn complex curves are logically deduced from his films of solid light done in the 1970s, just as, according to the eighteenth-century painter and theoretician, the serpentine line derives from the form of the cone. Translated from the French by Annette Michelson

22. William Hogarth, Of Lines, in The Analysis of Beauty (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 55.

Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion*

JONATHAN WALLEY
The radical transformations that took place in the arts after the Second World War reached a crescendo in the 1960s. The nature and possibilities of each art form were fundamentally rethought, while the idea that these art forms could be clearly distinguished from one another gave way to intensive experimentation with cross-fertilization and mixing. Recall Allan Kaprows statement, The young artist of today need no longer say I am a painter, or I am a dancer. He is simply an artist.1 Or this definition by Joseph Kosuth: Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art . . . Thats because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art.2 In the visual and performing arts, this period is described using terms like expanded arts, dematerialization, intermedia, and, more recently, the postmedium condition.3 The parallel term in film is expanded cinema. Put simply, it refers to cinema expanding beyond the bounds of traditional uses of celluloid film, the medium that had defined it for over six decades, to inhabit a wide range of other materials and forms.4
* This essay is dedicated to the memory of Adolfas Mekas. 1. Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, Art News 57 (October 1958), p. 57. 2. Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy, in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 19661990, ed. Gabriele Cuercio (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 18. Art After Philosophy originally appeared in Studio International (October 1969), and Kosuth first made this statement in Arthur R. Rose, Four Interviews, Arts Magazine 43 (February 1969), p. 23. 3. The term is Rosalind Krausss. See Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition, October 116 (Spring 2006), pp. 5562, and A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 4. I will use celluloid film to refer to all the physical components of the film medium taken together, as traditionally employed by filmmakers: camera, lenses, photochemical filmstrip, projector, and screen. I will use standard uses and traditional practices to refer to conventional filmmaking, as opposed to expanded-cinema practices in which the physical components of the film medium are multiplied, rearranged, replaced with other materials, abandoned, and/or used outside of the typical theatrical screening context. OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 2350. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

24

OCTOBER

As originally described by critics like Gene Youngblood and Sheldan Renan, expanded cinema included video and television, light shows, computer art, multimedia inst allat ion and per formance, kinet ic sculpture and theater, and holography, to name a few forms. It encompassed everything from mass-market theatrical films (Youngblood discusses Stanley Kubricks 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey) to experimental film (e.g., Michael Snows Wavelength and the films of Andy Warhol) to kinesthetic happenings and performances that employed no moving-image media whatsoever. As Youngblood had it, When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness . . . Expanded cinema isnt a movie at all: like life its a process of becoming, mans ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.5 The expansion of cinema was often characterized as liberating filmmakers from tradition and convention. As Renan wrote in 1967, expanded cinema rejected the idea that motion pictures should be made to universal specifications on given machines under given and never changing conditions.6 Cinema was now liberated from the concept of standardization.7 Like Youngblood, Renan conceived of cinema in the broadest possible terms. Any material that could be used to control or manipulate light and timemetal, magnetic tape, plastic, glass, the human bodycould be a cinematic material. But if this liberation of cinema from the confines of the standard uses of celluloid film opened a door onto an exciting world of possibilities, it also raised concerns among filmmakers about the very identity of their art form. And it was specifically within experimental film that this expansion reverberated most forcefully, given that worlds proximity to (which is not to say its inclusion in) the art world. While many filmmakers and sympathetic critics felt some of the same skepticism toward traditional practices with media that animated the expanded arts in general, they must also have had reservations about the implications of cinemas expansion. A belief in and commitment to the specificity of film had been key to the assertion of cinemas autonomy within the pantheon of the arts and, as important, to experimental cinemas articulation of its identity as an artistic tradition. To cast off the film medium was to risk losing a connection to a tradition with which contemporaneous experimental filmmakers identified as artists and earlier generations had labored to build and nurture. That the exploration of new intermedia forms in the name of expanded cinema dovetailed with the sudden surge of interest in the moving image in the art world only complicated matters. As cinema expanded in the direction of other arts, these other arts reached toward cinema for a way to extend their major aesthet ic interest s, much as they had done in the 1920s. Together, the t win phenomena of expanded cinema and the proliferation of moving images in the
5. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), p. 41. 6. Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1967), p. 227. 7. Ibid., p. 227.

Identity Crisis

25

museum and gallery introduced cinema to new spaces and forms, and brought to bear upon it new discourses: expanded cinemas language of new media, intermedia, and synesthesia, on the one hand, and the art worlds post-Minimalist theorizing, on the other hand, wherein cinema became sculptural, performative, conceptual, and, in a more contemporary theoretical formulation, post-medium. An early expression of concern over these developments was Annette Michelsons critically important essay Film and the Radical Aspiration, first published in Film Culture in 1966. According to Michelson, the erasure of boundaries between the arts and the ethic of intermedia at the heart of expanded cinema threatened to derail radical filmmakings quest for autonomy and drain cinema of its potential power: The questioning of the values of formal autonomy has led to an attempted dissolution of distinctions or barriers between media. . . . Cinema, on the verge of winning the battle for the recognition of its specificityand every major filmmaker and critic in the last halfcentury has fought that battleis now engaged in a reconsideration of its aims. The Victor now questions his Victory. The emergence of new intermedia, the revival of the old dream of synesthesia, the cross-fertilization of dance, theater, and film . . . constitute a syndrome of that radicalisms crisis, both formal and social.8 In this essay, Michelson chastised certain experimental filmmakers for uncritically parroting the rhetoric of other art forms (for example, Brakhages association of his films with Abstract Expressionism, or action painting). Michelson acknowledged the possibilityindeed, the necessityof film drawing upon the other arts. But for artistic cross-fertilization to bear fruit, each of the interacting art forms needed to be secure in its respective ontologies.9 As the youngest art form, cinemaits sense of ontological identity still maturingwas the most susceptible to losing its independence by borrowing the forms and ideas of the other arts. Though Michelson did not make the point explicitly, one implication of her essay was that experimental cinema was especially at risk of losing its identity and independence in the context of cinemas expansion. It may indeed have been that every major filmmaker and critic in the last half-century had contributed to cinemas struggle for autonomy, but experimental film lacked the high-cultural profile and well-established economic and institutional infrastructures of more mainstream cinematic modes such as Hollywood cinema and the international art filmnot to mention the other arts. Moreover, experimental film was historically, aesthetically, and institutionally interconnected with the other arts in ways that
8. Annette Michelson, Film and the Radical Aspiration, in The Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 420. 9. Ibid., p. 420.

26

OCTOBER

Hollywood and the art cinema werent, making it more difficult to define against the backdrop of the media-focused expanded and inter-arts practices of the period. Michelsons essay, therefore, was an important intervention in that it saw the question of cinemas identity not solely in aesthetic terms but in institutional (i.e., economic) ones as well. As we shall see, her concerns were felt by filmmakers at the time, and remain relevant today. Expanded cinema and the embrace of the moving image by the art world thus threatened two intertwined endeavors undertaken by filmmakers and critics for decades: the definition of their art form and the establishment of its autonomy and therefore its worthamong the other arts. Once cinema stepped beyond the bounds of standard practices with the physical medium that had embodied it for over sixty years, how was it to be defined, or even recognized? If cinema could be made from so many other materials, what made the resulting forms distinct from those of the other arts? As it entered the gallery and museum, what, if anything, secured its status as cinematic as opposed to sculptural, painterly, or something in the gray zones in between? In short, if cinema could be anything, what was to prevent it from becoming nothing, from dissolving into the generalized mass of synesthetic intermedia art, the return of the Gesamtkunstwerk? The question was no longer what is cinema? but what isnt cinema? Thus, simultaneous with cinemas expansion was a concentrated program of medium-specific filmmaking in the form of Structural and Structural-materialist film; many filmmakers engaged in this kind of work had come to experimental cinema from the other arts, often continuing to produce work in these other mediums while making films that aggressively asserted the materiality of the celluloid-film medium and it s uniqueness. This paradox went to the root s of experimental cinema, which had, after all, begun with the cinematic experiments of avant-garde artists such as Fernand Lger, Hans Richter, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, etc. The expansion of cinema, then, reanimated some of the fundamental questions and paradoxes of experimental cinemas history; these have continued to vex artists and scholars into the present day. Nearly ten years after Film and the Radical Aspiration, Michelson, in an essay on Paul Sharits, wondered about the nature and limits of Sharitss locational film works (gallery installations featuring film loops on multiple projectors) and their relationship to sculpture: that is, the ontological consequences attending films move into the gallery space.10 In 1984, well past the period of Structural and Structural-materialist films concentrated study of celluloid films specificity, the filmmaker Michael Mazire could still lament, Unfortunately experimental film often remains largely dependent on more established fine arts practices, unsure of its context.11 He concluded,
10. Annette Michelson, Paul Sharits and the Critique of Illusionism: an Introduction, Film Culture 6566 (1978), pp. 8789. 11. Michael Mazire, Towards a Specific Practice, in The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists Film and Video, ed. Michael Mazire and Nina Danino (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 43.

Identity Crisis

27

The quest is still for a language which can describe, define, propose and question the issues at work [in experimental film] without being purely derivative of other practices, a space where new terms are engendered through, by and with a film practice confident of its specific independence.12 The last decade or so has seen a resurgence of critical interest in the issues raised by expanded cinema and the art worlds turn toward the moving image. The questions posed by earlier generations of artists and scholars seem all the more pressing and confusing today, surrounded as we are by a new surge of moving-image art in the gallery (by Matthew Barney, Shirin Neshat, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, and others) and the rapid proliferation of new media forms the spread of digital moving-image technology that is ushering in a new chapter of cinemas expansion. But once again, the difficulty of defining expanded cinema presents itself, as does the related problem of pinning down cinemas specificity within an ever-widening field. The place of experimental cinema, too, is still a question to be reckoned with. As Chrissie Iles noted in a talk at the Tate Moderns controversial conference on expanded cinema in 2008, the challenge of defining expanded cinema stems from fact that cinema itselfpre-expansion, as it werewas so heterogeneous that the label expanded seems redundant; the cinema, that is, was always already expanded. Iles thus offered a distinction between Expanded Cinema (capital E, capital C, as she put it), which had been a specific historical moment growing out of Structural and Structural-materialist film, and an ongoing expansion and contraction of the cinema that could be traced back to the pre-cinematic pastat least as far back as experiments with anamorphism during the Baroque period. Expanded Cinema (capitalized) was simply one momentif an especially rich and important onein the more generalized process by which cinemas ontology is always being redefined and re-historicized, a process that continues into the present moment of new, digital media.13 Iless phrase expansion and contraction speaks to a give-and-take between a radically expanded ontology that projects cinema across a multiplicity of forms and materials, on the one hand, and a narrower, medium-specific ontology that seeks to differentiate cinema from the other arts, on the other. Iless suggestive distinction, including her identification of a historically specific Expanded Cinema tied directly to the tradition of experimental cinema, is worth pursuing further. The increasingly unwieldy mass of forms and materials placed under the heading of expanded cinema has rendered the term, capitalized or not, bloated to the point of near meaninglessness. The all-encompassing generality of the term
12. Ibid., p. 44. 13. Chrissie Iles, Inside Out: Expanded Cinema and Its Relationship to the Gallery in the 1970s, (paper presented at Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception, Tate Modern, London, April 1719, 2009), http://www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded/Narrative/Tate_Doc_Session _2_-CI.html. (accessed May 9, 2011). The filmmaker Bradley Eros employs the same distinction between expanded and contracted cinema in There Will Be Projections in All Dimensions, Millennium Film Journal 43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005), p. 66.

28

OCTOBER

loses sight of all manner of specific practicesdistinct artistic currents that once flowed into expanded cinema and have since flowed out in new directions. For instance, it seems unlikely that most of the artists represented in Youngbloods landmark book Expanded Cinema thought of their work in terms of the cinematic. Instead, expanded cinema named a cluster of nascent art forms that have subsequently become more distinct: video art, media art and activism, performance art, moving-image installation, experimental and alternative television, kinetic art, light art, and the electronic arts and new media more generally (including the earliest stages of computer art and the precursors of Internet art). In the moment that all of these new media and forms were appearing, expanded cinema was a handy catchall for any work involving moving images, electronic media, light, time, etc. But it could only be a temporary designation; as time passed, these embryonic art forms specified their practices and developed their own histories defined by major artists and works, supporting institutions, and distinct critical languages and concepts. Moving-image work in the gallery, too, distinguished itself from cinema by invoking the language of the other arts, particularly the sculptural, a category that had radically expanded. That distinctionbetween the sculptural moving-image art of the gallery and the cinematic work of the theater (the white cube and the black box)remains with us today.14 Experimental Cinema (capital E, capital C, if you like) was distinguishing itself in much the same way during the same period. Though its history could be traced to the films of the European avant-garde of the 1920s, it only crystallized as a mode of film practice during the post-WWII period in places like New York, San Francisco, and London. This crystallization took place not only around key figures and dominant critical discourses but around institutions as well: co-ops, exhibition venues, journals, and structures of distribution and exhibition that continue to define the tradition. In short, experimental cinema was struggling for its identity and independence just like the other young artistic movements of the 1960s and 70sat the very moment when the preoccupation with intermedia and artistic expansion seized the art world. It might seem counterintuitive to subject expanded cinema to a categorization of the specific media and practices contained within it when it seems so manifestly about the subversion and disintegration of such categories. But a taxonomy of expanded cinema recognizes what the more generalized and accommodating conceptions cannot, such as the unique communities, critical vocabularies, and institutions that constitute the histories of, say, experimental cinema, video art, and alternative TV. Moreover, such a taxonomy does not require absolute, inflexible boundaries between art forms, nor does it need systematic notions of the specificity of each relevant medium (e.g., film, video), though it must recognize that the discourses of specificity and independence
14. For a discussion of this, see Jonathan Walley, Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde, in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing/Afterall, 2008), pp. 18299.

Identity Crisis

29

were certainly as significant to the art of the time as the ethic of expansion and boundary-breaking. In fact, the conception of expanded cinema I am proposing recognizes the interplay between generality (in which differences among art forms dissolve) and specificity (where each art forms distinctness and autonomy are asserted, explored, sustained): between expansion and contraction. * One way to address this distinction is in terms of the perceived relationship between the art of cinema and the medium of film. The assumption that cinema and film were identicalthe former an art form embodied in the latterwas the idea that expanded cinema countered. Medium-specificity, then, is understood as being directly opposed to the inter-arts generality of expanded cinema, an opposition mirrored in the other arts. Throughout its history, however, experimental cinema had produced morecomplicated meditations (in both theory and practice) on the nature of film and its relationship to the ontology of cinema. In this context, there were no simple distinctions between a medium-specific film practice and expanded conceptions of cinema. For example, the critic Deke Dusinberre suggested in 1975 that the materialist emphasis of European experimental cinema was leading in an unexpected direct ion: some filmmaker s, scrut inizing films mater ials in their investigations of cinemas fundamental principles, had produced work that abandoned the medium of celluloid film entirely. Dusinberre referred to Anthony McCalls Long Film for Ambient Light (1975), Tony Hills shadow performance Point Source (1973), and work by Valie Export and Peter Weibel. A paradox emerges, he wrote. The very emphasis on the material nature of the cinema . . . leads to immateriality.15 Expanded cinema and materialist filmmaking, seemingly two entirely opposite enterprises, were in fact interconnected. Looking back on this period from a contemporary perspective, Rosalind Krauss has argued that the medium-specific inclinations of experimental filmmakers in the 1960s produced a sophisticated ontological modelone that was suggestive to other artists: The rich satisfactions of thinking about films specificity at that juncture derived from the mediums aggregate condition, one that led a slightly later generation of theorists to define its support with the compound idea of the apparatusthe medium or support for film being neither the celluloid strip of the images, nor the camera that filmed them, nor the beam of light that relays them to the screen, nor that screen itself, but all of these taken together, including the audiences position caught
15. Deke Dusinberre, On Expanding Cinema, Studio International 190 (Nov.Dec. 1975), p. 224.

30

OCTOBER

between the source of the light behind it and the image projected before its eyes.16 In Krausss view, Structural films aim was one of producing the unity of this diversified support in a single, sustained experience.17 Krauss suggests that Structural filmmakers demonstrated the interdependency of their mediums component elements through the use of metaphors. For example, building upon Michelsons seminal phenomenological analysis of Michael Snows Wavelength (1967), Krauss interprets that film as an abstract spatial metaphor for films relation to time.18 This was a metaphor of pure horizontal thrust built out of the films famous forty-five-minute zoom-in, the illusory depth of the loft space, the suspense generated by the unfolding narrative action, and the slow rising of the sine wave on the soundtrack.19 This metaphor provided a unifying framework through which the viewer could apprehend the interdependence of the film mediums elements. Snows own comments on his film support Krausss apparatus-inflected interpretation: I was thinking of planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of illusion and fact, all about seeing. The space starts at the cameras (spectators) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).20 This conception of film as a network of interrelated components was far subtler than the reductive commonplace of modernist film criticism: that each Structural or Structural-materialist film was simply about the frame, or about flatness, or about flicker.21 As Snows comments suggest, Krausss itemization of the distinct yet interconnected components of film echoes a common tendency among experimental filmmakers and critics, particularly in the 1960s and 70s (and later in writing that makes reference to the films of that period). Attempts to isolate the
16. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, pp. 2425. 17. Ibid., p. 25. 18. Ibid., p. 26. 19. Ibid. 20. Snow, quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 19431978, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 375. 21. It should be noted that along with Michelson, P. Adams Sitney and Deke Dusinberre interpreted Snows film, and Structural film in general, in metaphorical terms of this sort. In both cases, the metaphoric interpretation counters the reductive, literal understanding of these films as being about nothing more than the film medium itself. Indeed, for Dusinberre, North American Structural films like Snows solved a problem that confronted European Structural-materialist film: that a purely reflexive, medium-specific aesthetic rendered films literally meaningless, unable to provide any further insight into . . . processes of cognition and comprehension, isolated in a closed circle of presence and self-reference. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, pp. 37880, and Deke Dusinberre, St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde, Afterimage 6 (Summer 1976), pp. 1415.

Identity Crisis

31

medium-specific in film frequently produced laundry lists of films basic materials and physical properties. This tendency is perhaps best represented by David Jamess account of Structural film, which, he argues: variously emphasized the material nature of film and the separate stages of the production processfrom script, through editing and projection, to reception by the audience. Thus: flicker films . . . are about the optical effects of rapidly alternating monochromatic frames; Michael Snows Wavelength (1967), Back-Forth (1969) and La Region Centrale (1971) are about the effects of camera zoom, panning, and 360degree rotation; Barry Gersons films are about the ambiguous space between legibility and abstraction and thus draw attention to the dependence of representation on focus, framing, camera angle, and so forth. . . . And on through the list, it is possible to map out a periodic table of all structural films, all possible structural films, by positing a film constructed to manifest each moment in an atomized model of the entire cinematic process.22 The filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice mapped out just such a periodic table of Structural films, including films based on concerns which derive from the camera, concerns which derive from the editing process, concerns which derive from the physical nature of film, concern with duration as a concrete dimension, and concern with the semantics of image and with the construction of meaning through language systems.23 Paul Sharitss essay Words Per Page maps out an intensive study of film (a program of study he named cinematics) that ranged from emulsion grains and sprocket holes to processes of intending to make a film and processes of experiencing [a film].24 What is striking about these laundry lists of uniquely filmic elements is not how often such lists have been formulated, but how much they vary and how many different types of elements they incorporate, ranging from the resolutely material (emulsion grains, sprocket holes, the shutter) to the elusively ephemeral (light, time, ideas, and spectatorial experience). One might expect the itemization of film-specific elements to be a simpler matter: just list the parts of the film stock, camera, and projector, ident ifying these as the neutral mater ial ground upon which a medium-specific aesthetic can be based. But once a list of films specifics begins, it quickly proliferatesexpands, in factsuggesting, once more, that cinema is always already expanded. In doing so, these ontologies open up onto much more heterogeneous conceptions of cinema than one would anticipate from a medium-specific theory or practice. Sharits, for instance, closes his essay by stating, It may be that in
22. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 243. 23. Malcolm Le Grice, Thoughts on Recent Underground Film, Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972), p. 83. 24. Paul Sharits, Words Per Page, Film Culture 6566 (1978), p. 37.

32

OCTOBER

limiting oneself to a passionate definition of an elemental, primary cinema, one may find it necessary to construct systems involving either no projector at all or more than one projector and more than one flat screen, and more than one volumetric space between them.25 And Jamess atomized model of the entire cinematic process slides seamlessly from cameras, lenses, flicker, and framing to a conceptual cinema, much like Bazins myth of total cinema, existing in a primordial state in the pre-cinematic period of Muybridge and Marey.26 Within the world of experimental film, then, there was no easy distinction between a medium-specific film practice and an expanded one, just as Dusinberre observed. The atomized conception of film provided the basis for a body of work that was expanded without losing its connection to the medium. Film, that is, was heterogeneous enoughinternally-differentiated, to use Krausss term.27 There could be an expanded cinema that was, at the same time, distinctly filmic. But where Krauss claims that the aim of Structural film was to unify the mediums component parts, the expanded work of filmmakers like Sharits signals a different path. Once film had been so atomized, filmmakers could intervene at any point in its table of elements; these elements could be multiplied (as in works that utilized multiple projectors and/or screens), rearranged, and/or replaced with alternative materials. Filmmakers could even abandon certain elements completely, the better to concentrate on the remaining ones, such as Sharitss systems involving . . . no projector at all, or Tony Conrads series of unprojectable film objects made by cooking, twisting, or hammering raw film stock. Rather than producing the unity of this diversified support, filmmakers working with this atomized model produced its disunity, dismantling the medium, breaking the interdependent elements of the apparatus apart and subjecting them to all manner of permutations to increase its diversity. Or, putting it a different way, it was the elemental conception of the film medium that unified these works, providing an abstract model that individual instances of expanded cinema could reference, even at many levels of remove. Indeed, the process could go as far as those filmless works by McCall and Hill that puzzled Dusinberre and referenced the physical medium conceptually or metaphorically. Hollis Framptons idea of the film machine is one version of this expanded ontology. Though he used the term in only one essay, For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses, the idea reverberates through many of his other writings. In Framptons view, film could not be reduced to the celluloid strip, the camera, or the projector; it was, rather, the sum of all these things taken together: We are used to thinking of camera and projector as machines, but they are not. They are parts. The flexible filmstrip is as much a
25. 26. 27. Ibid., p. 43. James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 243. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, p. 30.

Identity Crisis

33

part of the film machine as the projectile is part of a firearm. . . . Since all the parts fit together, the sum of all film, all projectors, and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine.28 Defining film in this way allowed Frampton to imagine a filmmaking process that replaced or simply removed some of the parts without sacrificing the resulting works legibility as a film: If filmstrip and projector are parts of the same machine, then a film may be defined operationally as whatever will pass through a projector. The least thing that will do that is nothing at all. Such a film has been made. It is the only unique film in existence.29 The only unique film in existence to which Frampton referred was the composer Takehisa Kosugis performance piece Film and Film #4 (1965). In it, Kosugi made rectangular cuts of increasing size from a paper screen lit by the beam of an empty 16mm projector (starting with a small cut at the center of the screen and working his way out until there was, in effect, no screen left, and the projectors beam hit the rear wall of the space). Though it employed no celluloid, Film and Film #4 makes very clear references to the material conditions of filmmaking. Its alternations of white (the screen, the beam of light) and black (the darkened space, the growing hole in the screen), which Kosugi extended to the clothing he wore during the performance, invoke black-and-white photography, and positive and negative imagery. The alternations made to the screen suggest such filmic elements as framing, zooming, cutting (of course), and change over time. In Framptons 1968 Hunter College lecture, an empty projector runs while a text by Frampton on the nature of film plays on a tape recorder at the front of the screening space. During the lecture, the projectionist makes four films by inserting objects into the projector gate or by placing a hand or colored filter over the lens. It seems that a film is anything that may be put into a projector that will modulate the emerging beam of light, Frampton wrote, once again alluding to Kosugis piece.30 Al Wongs Moon Light (1984), a film installation with performer, employed an empty projector, moonlight, sunlight, and fire to fill the installation space with light and shadow. The performer used a mirrored disk to reflect light from the various sources around the space. Like Kosugi, Wong saw the interaction of light and shadow in filmic terms, as positive and negative imagery. Empty-projector performances like these represent one branch of a group of expanded works that collectively dismantle the film machine, displacing its compo28. Hollis Frampton, For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses, in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), p. 137. 29. Ibid. 30. Hollis Frampton, A Lecture, in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 127.

34

OCTOBER

nents with substitute materials and actions. Here, celluloid film itself is replaced by another object that modulates the projector beam: the performer him/herself. The distinction between film production and exhibition is thereby collapsed, a move that was characteristic of much materialist film and expanded cinema of the same period (particularly in Europe). Such works conceive performance in essentially cinematic terms, making it a fundamental ontological element of cinema rather than an alien form (i.e., theater). In so doing, they place film into a position of parity with the rich and expansive field of performance-based art, but they also maintain an associative link with the materials of film and the inherently filmic aesthetic qualities or traits that medium-specific filmmaking favored. Another group of expanded-cinema works inverted the empty-projector performance, retaining the filmstrip but eliminating every other component of the film machine, frequently rendering the strip unprojectable and thus necessitating alternative modes of presentation. Among the best-known examples is the series of films that Conrad produced from 1973 to 1975, which he made by subjecting filmstrips to such processes as frying, roasting, hammering, and electrocuting, making them unprojectable. Sharits and Peter Kubelka created installation versions of their flicker films, including the formers Ray Gun Virus (1966) and the latters Arnulf Rainer (1960), in which the films were cut into strips of uniform length and mounted between Plexiglas. Conrad made a similar film object called Flicker Matte (1974), a mat (as in doormat or place mat) made by weaving together clear and opaque 16mm filmstrips, a joke on the flicker films he had produced in the previous decade. Takahiko Iimura has recently revisited a series of film installations he produced in the 1970s that were intended to reveal what he called the film-system.31 Like Frampton, Iimura conceived of film as the sum total of interrelated elements, which he put on display in installation form. In 2007, he issued a limited edition of twenty-four-frame (one second) strips of clear or opaque 16mm film spliced into tiny loops and encased in transparent plastic boxes. These film objects are exhibited in ways that call to mind painting (the Sharits and Kubelka films) or sculpture (Conrad and Iimura). But their makers consistently described them in the language of experimental-film culture, sometimes going so far as to explicitly distinguish them from other art forms. Conrad, for instance, saw his film objects as a logical endgame to the materialist practices of contemporaneous experimental film,32 as well as an attempt to liberate filmmakers from an unexamined reliance on (and therefore unwitting collusion with) the corporate manufacturers of film technology, such as Kodak.33 Employing nontemporal, sculptural forms, Conrad could radically extend the exploration of
31. Takahiko Iimura, On Film-Installation, Millennium Film Journal 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 7476. Also see Walley, Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde, in Art and the Moving Image, p. 195. 32. Tony Conrad, Is This Penny Ante or a High Stakes Game? An Interventionist Approach to Experimental Filmmaking, Millennium Film Journal 43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005), pp. 103104. 33. See Conrads statement in a piece entitled Montage of Voices in Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 198687), pp. 25657, and Yellow Movies in Tony Conrad: Yellow Movies, a catalogue published by Galerie Daniel Buchholz and Greene Naftali Gallery, 2008, p. 22.

Identity Crisis

35

Takahiko Iimura. One Second Loop (=Infinity): A White Line in Black. 2007.

extreme duration that was characteristic of his work and that of many other experimental filmmakers of the period. Similarly, Iimuras film boxes, like the installations with which they are associated, invoke a duality that shaped the work of a number of other filmmakers, including Sharits and Frampton: that film is at once a static physical object and an ephemeral temporal experience. The loop, identified by Sitney as one of the four characteristics of Structural film, is a device that was used to extendsometimes indefinitelythe duration of experimental films and installations.34 But Iimuras loops are so small they cannot be projected, a playful expansion on the loops indeterminate temporality that turns them into non-temporal, static objects. The ephemerality of film in projection suggested by the reference to looping meets the physicality of film-as-object. Conrads film objects can be interpreted comically, as parodies of materialist filmmaking practices that play with notions of processing, chemistry, cutting, etc., humorously substituting domestic activities like cooking and weaving for con34. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 370.

36

OCTOBER

ventional production and postproduction processes. But all of these film objects are ironic, referencing the film machine and the conventional experience of film in projection precisely by subverting and stubbornly resisting them. In this way, such objects represent cinema at its most expanded and most contracted. They are material(ist) to the point of objecthood, a contraction of cinema to a single physical element. But this degree of contraction results in a form that could be called sculptural (hence expanding cinema beyond the bounds of its conventional format) or conceptual (inasmuch as they are artifacts that call to mind other processes and experiences not present in the works themselvesthose of the film machine). I will return to the notion of conceptual cinema, a phenomenon at the furthest reaches of cinemas expansion in the 1960s and 70s. To get there, however, requires looking at another variation of expanded cinemas dismantling or reorganization of the film machine: the replacement of the parts of that machine with alternative parts, a process of creative substitution that mobilized all sorts of other materials in the creation of cinema. Just as any of films elements could be removed, as in empty-projector performances or unprojectable film objects, or multiplied, as in works using multiple screens and projectors, they could also be swapped out for other materials. These materials become legible as cinematic via a metaphorical association with the specific film elements they replace, an association made possible by the overarching notion of the always already

Alan Berliner. Cine-Matrix. 1977.

Identity Crisis

37

expanded cinema: the heterogeneous, component ontology of film at large in experimental-film culture. Conrad and Alan Berliner both made variants of paper films (Berliners term, it is in part a reference to the means by which early films were registered with the Library of Congress) in the 1970s. 35 Conrads Yellow Movies series (197375) replaced both filmstrip and screen with a rectangular sheet of paper cut to proportions of 1.33:1 (the pre-widescreen Academy ratio) and painted with cheap commercial house paint. Conrad referred to the paint as emulsion and the paper sheets as both base and screen; he claimed that the slow photochemical changes that took place over decades, causing the white paint to turn yellow, constituted not only a production process but also each works running time. As a production professor at the University of Oklahoma from 1977 to 1979, Berliner, rather than making traditional projectable films, produced a series of cinematic works on paper, cardboard, and photographic scrolls. These include Cine-Matrix (1977), a grid of 156 images on pieces of cardboard, and Three Years (1978), a paper scroll made from three years worth of calendar pages tape-spliced end to end. I never stopped thinking of myself as a filmmaker, Berliner has said in reference to these works. And, looking back, I still believe that not making films in Oklahoma ultimately made me a better filmmaker.36 These works eliminate the need for a projector, but another strain of expanded cinema replaces the projector with specialized, nonstandard projection machines, usually fashioned by the filmmakers themselves. The best-known example of this is Ken Jacobss Nervous System, which Jacobs has used in live-projection performances since the early 1970s. The Nervous System is made from two synchronized 16mm analytic projectors fitted with a giant external shutter (like a whirling fan blade). The two projectors are loaded with identical film prints, aimed at the same spot on the screen (rather than side by side as in other multi-projector films), and run in synchronization, the external shutter alternately blocking the light of one and allowing the light from the other to pass. Jacobs loads each projector so that the two film prints are a few frames apart. This results in slight differences between the two images the projectors cast onto the screen. The rapid, flickering alternation of two slightly varied images creates a pronounced 3-D effect without the need for special glasses, a phenomenon Jacobs has explored further with his Nervous Magic Lantern, constructed in the early 1990s. Unlike the Nervous System, Nervous Magic Lantern performances utilize no film. Transparencies and objects are placed between a bright light source and an assortment of lenses, producing three-dimensional moving images with the aid of an external shutter similar to that of the Nervous System.37 As early as 1965, Jacobs began working with 3-D shadow play as a type of
35. See Scott MacDonalds interview with Berliner in his A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 15758. 36. Ibid., p. 157. 37. For further descriptions of the workings of the Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern (the latter of which Jacobs had previously been secretive about), see Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 273.

38

OCTOBER

cinematic practice (one that didnt require nearly the outlay of capital that conventional filmmaking did). He has referred to such work, which evolved into the Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances, as paracinema.38 An equivalent cinema, Jacobs has explained, created by other than filmic means or by using film in other than standard ways; equivalent, or parallel to, is what I had meant to convey.39 This idea of equivalency is another expression of the relationship between the film machinethe medium in its familiar, conventional stateand works of expanded cinema that dispense with some or all of that machines parts without losing a connection to it. A variant of this strain of expanded cinema combines standard film projection with additional devices that modulate the projector beam or directly affect the filmstrip. In David Dyes Western Reversal (1973), the filmmaker projects a reel from a 1950s Western through a device consisting of sixteen tiny, movable mirrors, breaking the onscreen image into a grid of sixteen separate frames that can be shifted about individually. Dye moves each square around the screen like so many puzzle pieces, first dismantling the image then reconstituting it, a process that he must complete before the reel ends. Another example might be Annabel Nicolsons Reel Time (1973), also a projection performance, in which an enormous film loop passed through both a projector and a sewing machine (operated by Nicolson). The filmstrip was dotted with more and more perforations with each pass through the loop, producing an increasingly abstract image and eventually weakening the strip to the point that it broke, bringing the performance to an end. Another group of works retain conventional projection but employ alternative screens. A number of practitioners of expanded cinema explored steam, haze, clouds, etc., as surfaces for projection, as in Stan VanDerBeeks Steam Screens (1969), Anthony McCalls solid light films (e.g., Line Describing a Cone [1973] and Conical Solid [1974]), and Liz Rhodess Light Music (1975). Still others incorporated the human body into their work as a kind of screen, as in Malcolm Le Grices Horror Film #1 (1971), in which the filmmaker stands between a bank of 16mm projectors and the screen and interacts with both the projected imagery and his own multiple shadows. Tapp und Tast Kino (Touch Cinema , 1968), a notorious expanded-cinema performance by Valie Export and Peter Weibel, explored the political resonances of the body as screen, fiercely critiquing the film industrys use of images of female
38. The term paracinema has been used to refer to expanded-cinema works, such as Jacobss, Berliners, and Conrads, that entirely abandon the elements of the film medium with alternative materials. It has frequently been employed by Ken Jacobs, who seems to have been the first to use it, along with Larry Gottheim, as a faculty member at SUNY Binghamton in the 1970s. In addition to Jacobs, Gottheim, and Berliner, the filmmakers Barry Gerson, Kerry Laitala, and Bradley Eros have used the term to describe their expanded work. See Jonathan Walley, The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film, October 103 (Winter 2003), pp. 1530. For the first use of the term in print (as far as I have been able to determine), see Lindley Hanlon, Kenneth Jacobs, Interviewed by Lindley Hanlon ( Jerry Sims Present), April 9, 1974, Film Culture 6769 (1979), pp. 6586. 39. Ken Jacobs, Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows of Evanescent Cinema, Millennium Film Journal 43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005), p. 40.

Valie Export and Peter Weibel. Tapp und Tast Kino. 1968. Courtesy Charim Galerie, Vienna.

40

OCTOBER

sexuality to reproduce and reinforce ideological norms governing that sexuality. In this performance, Export wore a cardboard box over her naked torso, as Weibel encouraged onlookers to reach into the box (understood as a miniature movie theater, complete with a set of makeshift curtains at the front) to touch Exports bare breasts. Export and Weibels expanded-cinema performances and installations constitute a veritable catalogue of possibilities in the disintegration and displacement of the film machine and of the implications of the varied new forms expanded cinema could takeperformative, sculptural, painterly. Export and Weibel negotiated between the pure physical materiality of the film medium and reality in the spirit of the mixing of art and life that was practically the definition of expanded art. But they did so without sacrificing a connection to films specificity. Their work also illustrates how filmmakers could continue to assert the autonomy of their art form without cutting it off from the other arts. Export has stated that her use of natural materials such as water, light, and the body created unexpected and yet fundamentally illuminating connections with minimal art, land art, arte povera.40 Export has described her works with Weibel as constituting a large-scale project of breaking up the commercial-conventional sequence of filmmakingshooting, editing . . . and projection.41 Their work often eliminated these elements of the medium, which were replaced by reality in order to install new signs of the real.42 She writes: The expansion of our film work proceeded initially from the material concept; thus the illusion film was transformed into the material film, and in this way the foundations of the film medium were reflected. . . . The formal arrangement of the elements of film, whereby elements are exchanged or replaced by others for example, electric light by fire, celluloid by reality, a beam of light by rocketshad an effect which was artistically liberating and yielded a wealth of new possibilities, such as film installations and the film-environment. In the production of the film medium, celluloid is only one aspect that could (also) be deleted.43 Two examples of Exports deletion of filmic elements, and her exchange of these for others, are Abstract Film No. 1 (196768) and Instant Film (1968). The former featured flashlight beams casting light on mirrors covered in various liquids, which reflected the light onto a nearby screen. The latter was simply a piece of transparent PVC foil, which Export has referred to as screen, projector, and camera all in one44

40. Valie Export, Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality, Senses of Cinema 28 (September/October 2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ 2003/28/expanded_cinema/ (accessed May 9, 2011). 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.

Identity Crisis

41

and which could be used by the spectator in any number of waysdisplayed on a wall, cut or perforated and peered through, etc. It should also be noted that Export combines two different meanings of material in her phrase material film. Though the work is rooted in the materialas in literal, physicalelements of the film medium, the replacement of these with real bodies and actions rather than illusory ones leads to another kind of materialist cinema. Material, in this sense of the word, extends beyond the raw materials of film technology to the routinized practices and institutions of filmmaking, exhibition, and spectatorship that had coalesced over seventy years of cinema history. Hence, Export and Weibels expanded cinema was intended as much as an intervention into the dominant patterns of cinema spectatorship as it was as an investigation of films medium-specificity. The attack on the continuity of the phases of production, Export claimed, robs the production companies of their conventional success.45 Whats more, Export extends the project of dismantling the film machine into a temporal dimension. That is, the component elements of the medium are understood as not only spatially discrete (projector here, screen there, etc.), but as temporally discrete as well: first the filmstrip is exposed in the camera, then processed, edited, and finally projected. The temporality of production and exhibition could be alteredexpanded or contractedin the same manner as the individual parts of the machine. By this logic, the long duration of works like Warhols Empire (1964) or McCalls twenty-four-hour installation Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) greatly expand one temporal phase of film production and/or exhibition (the extreme duration Conrad attributed to his Yellow Movies and film objects is another, more radical example). Similarly, live film-based performances such as Kosugis, Le Grices, and Export and Weibels contract normally
45. Ibid.

Export. Abstract Film No. 1. 196768. Courtesy Charim Galerie, Vienna.

Tony Hill. Point Source. 1973.

Identity Crisis

43

distinct phases into a single moment: the viewer experiences simultaneously the making and viewing of the work. Such was also the case in Conrads Film Feedback (there were at least two realizations in 1974), a private performance that merged the processes of image making, chemical processing, and projection. Conrad made the film with a team of students dispersed through three rooms: a projection booth with a large window, a screening room facing the booth on the other side of the window, and a small room next to the booth. In the projection booth, in place of a projector, was a 16mm camera aimed at the screen in the screening room. A small lighted candle sat in front of the screen, with a projector placed behind it for rearscreen projection. Under normal shooting circumstances, the camera would have been closed to prevent the film inside from being exposed to light. In this case, however, the projector booth was darkened, allowing the back of the camera to be left off so that the film passed out of the camera (running at five frames per second), over a series of rollers, and under the door to the adjacent room. In this room, also darkened, the exposed film was passed one foot at a time through a tray of developer, another of fixer, wiped off, then run over a second series of rollers into the screening room, where it was fed into the rearscreen projector. As the images began to appear on the screen, the camera in the projection booth recorded them and the process began again. The result was a feedback loop of nested images of the candle and screen; it can be viewed now as a 16mm printan artifact of the filming/processing/viewing experience that made up the performance. Exports idea of the exchange of film and reality, and the projects she and Weibel made that enacted this idea, reveal just how far expanded cinemas disintegration and/or displacement of the film machine could go. The result could be material or filmic works that eliminated every component of the medium without , however, losing their associat ion with that medium. Jacobss shadow playsthose works he named paracinemaare one instance of a completely filmless expanded cinema. Works like these have been described as reducing cinema to essentials like light and time, but in fact they maintain deeper and more complex associative links with the film machine. McCalls Long Film for Ambient Light, a twentyfour-hour installation consisting of nothing more than a loft space, a bare lightbulb, and diffused windows, was described by its maker in terms of its relationship to the customary photochemical and electro-mechanical processes and the presuppositions behind film as an art activity.46 In Tony Hills 1973 performance Point Source, the filmmaker shines an intense point-source light through an assortment of household objects, casting massive shadows onto the surrounding walls (the piece is sometimes performed in a film theater, other times in galleries). Hill identifies his
46. Anthony McCall, Two Statements, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), pp. 25354.

44

OCTOBER

non-filmic materials in filmic terms: a small bright light is the projector, several objects are the film and the whole room is the screen.47 The logical next step in this process (allowing that the logic of the expanded arts was highly creative and idiosyncratic) would be to substitute the material components of the film machine for the idea of these components. Dusinberre referred to Export and Weibels work as having taken the fundamental first principles of cinema out of their specifically filmic context to deal with them conceptually (e.g., the idea of projection).48 If the parts of the film machine could be replaced by other materials, including reality itself, then concepts could serve as equally acceptable replacements, resulting in a cinema that was purely conceptuala mental or, maybe, a discursive form. Conrads Yellow Movies could be taken as one example, a strange cross between a resolutely material film object and a conceptual film. While Conrad made explicit associations between the paint and paper he used and the customary materials of photography, he has also described these works as imaginary; their extreme durationstill screening after nearly 40 yearsmeans that our direct contact with them is so brief compared to their actual running times that the majority of our contemplation of the Yellow Movies takes place in the imagination.49 In a major reconsideration of Structural film written ten years after its heyday, Paul Arthur claimed that this act of exploding the fixed boundaries of image-duration was a central feature of experimental films exploration of alternative modes of film-viewer relations.50 For Arthur, Warhols Empire was, like Conrads paracinema, a landmark in the history of this process. That films extreme duration encouraged fragmentary contact between viewer and film, so that the experience of the film was as much imagined as real. Moreover, the form and image-content of the film are so immediately open to paraphrastic statement that one can construct a distinct impression of what its experience entails.51 And by the time Arthur wrote his essay, Empire (like all of Warhols films) had been removed from circulation by its maker and was thus only accessible at a level of removethrough descriptions, analyses, and interpretations. Indeed, according to Arthur, the films existence as an imagined object in consciousness has become its essential condition, its locus of meaning and influence.52 Though one might object to Arthurs claims on the grounds that Warhols films were never as simplistic and minimal as the discourse addressing them (and replacing them) said they were, Arthur was correct that the films exerted influence more through discourseword of mouth, critical writings, theoretical abstractionsthan through
47. Hill, Tony Hill Films, Point Source, http://www.tonyhillfilms.com/films (accessed May 10, 2011). 48. Dusinberre, On Expanding Cinema, p. 220. 49. Tony Conrad, Yellow Movie 2/1626/73 (1973), audio file, http://www.moma.org/explore/ multimedia/audios/53/1024 (accessed May 1, 2011). 50. Paul Arthur, Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact, Millennium Film Journal 1/2 (Spring 1978), p. 12. 51. Ibid., p. 5. 52. Ibid.

Identity Crisis

45

actual encounters with the film in projection. Hence, Arthur refers to Empires de-centering and emptying not only of image-content and means but of projection as the ontological requirement for films status as artifact, and concludes, At last, the first conceptual film.53 The term conceptual film has been used to describe films made by Conceptual artists, often to document performances or events that could not otherwise be reproduced. Arthurs usage, however, suggests a film that exists solely as a mental entity and which therefore can only take the form of thoughts or words. This usage, though more obscure than the others, was not uncommon during the period of which Arthur writes. The idea of a conceptual cinema, existing as intention, belief, thought, or discourse, appears in various forms throughout the 1960s and 70s and has been consolidated by more recent scholar ship on Structural and related film, including that of Arthur and David James. James argues that Structural films search for an entirely literal film language . . . goes further and further back through the archaeology of early cinema, past the reflexive audience confrontation and the movable shot in The Great Train Robbery, past the almost schematic analysis of illusion in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, and so to the premonition of Warhol in the earliest preserved film, John RiceMay Irwin Kiss. Eventually the search falls away in the filmstrips of Muybridge, in the enumeration of the components of a possible cinema, and in the speculations in which the idea of film was first broached, the first conceptual film created.54 By this logic, Structural films and expanded works, in different ways, mirror the earliest ideas of the possibility of cinema, crystallizing these concepts into a more recognizable form. This notion that the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s and 70s restarted film history, often by going back to the period of pre-cinema to mine the territory of the idea of film, was a creatively generative one for a number of filmmakers and an important interpretive schema for many critics. During the initial explosion of expanded-cinema activity in New York and San Francisco, for instance, Jonas Mekas produced the following paean to the dream of cinema in his Village Voice column: We are only one step from the absolute cinema, cinema of our mind. For what is cinema really, if not images, dreams, and visions? We take one more step, and we give up all movies and we become movies: We sit on a Persian or Chinese rug smoking one dream matter or another and we watch the smoke and we watch the images and dreams and fantasies that are taking place right
53. 54. Ibid., p. 6. James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 242.

46

OCTOBER

there in our eyes mind: we are the true cineasts, each of us, crossing space and time and memorythis is the ultimate cinema of the people, as it has been for thousands and thousands of years. This is all real! There are no limits to mans dreams, fantasies, desires, visions. It has nothing to do with technological innovations: It has to do with the boundless spirit of man, which can never be confined to screens, frames, or images. It jumps out of any matter of any dream imposed upon it, and seeks its own mysteries and its own dreams.55 An undated, unrealized piece called Blackout, described on a note card in the Hollis Frampton file at Anthology Film Archives, makes comic reference to experimental films demand for mentally active and participatory spectators, an idea transposed into physical activity in real space in installations like McCalls, Iimuras, and Exports. The card reads: Scene from new Arlis Grampton film, Blackout , in which Grampton graphically demonstrates his theory of cerebral cinema by pulling plug out of projector and allowing audience to sit in dark, silent room for 2-and-a-half hours. Audience is thus obliged to fall back on own resources rather than relying on imagination of an individual we designate as a filmmaker to entertain us. Audience members at first react by thinking There is no movie, but gradually come to realize through Gramptons subtle artistry the obvious fact that the movie is and always has been what is going on in their own minds. It is likely that Blackout was written by someone other than Frampton and given to the filmmaker, perhaps as a playful homage.56 But it resonates with Framptons belief, elaborated more fully in his extensive theoretical writings, that cinema was as much a conceptual phenomenon as anything elsethe product of the mind, not just the medium. Some of these writings read like an avant-garde reimagining of Bazins The Myth of Total Cinema. Frampton, writing a couple of decades later and in the midst of a period of radically expansive ontological thinking, took Bazins creative historicism to an extreme, claiming cinema as an ancient art form first manifested in music (and, with a sweeping reductiveness characteristic of his writing, Frampton traced the history of music back to the sounds of insectsorganized sound for
55. Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, p. 146. 56. According to Marion Faller, Framptons widow, Blackout was probably not Framptons but an homage that he kept. She adds that the index card was originally attached, in the lower left corner, to a sheet of black construction paper. My assumption is that the piece dates from some time after A Lecture (Oct 1968). Marion Faller, email to author, June 21, 2011. Ken Eisenstein, who has done significant research on Frampton and to whom I am grateful for making me aware of Blackout, concurs.

Identity Crisis

47

the purposes of expression).57 In For a Metahistory of Film, he proposes an infinite cinema: A polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever, its lens focused upon all the appearances of the world. Before the invention of still photography, the frames of the infinite cinema were blank . . . then a few images began to appear upon the endless ribbon of film. Since the birth of the photographic cinema, all the frames are filled with images. . . . A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.58 This creative historicism is one more example of a kind of theorizing that enabled and explained expanded cinema, a theorizing wherein cinema is an idea manifest across a plurality of forms that are imagined by contemporary experimental filmmakers in the terms of the film medium (Framptons polymorphous camera and endless ribbon of film). That is, despite the polymorphous nature of cinema, its specificity is protected against loss amidst a limitlessly heterogeneous field by reference to its home medium of film and the major animating concepts of experimental-film culture. Further defense of cinemas specificity is provided by the historical reversal Frampton proposes; though the motion pictures were predated by still photography, a state of affairs reflected in Framptons own artistic career, film, by this way of thinking, exists before photography. And before every other art form, as well. In a 1973 letter to Donald Richie, then curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Frampton wrote, I venture to suggest that a time may come when the whole history of art will become no more than a footnote to the history of film . . . or of whatever evolves from film.59 * The categories of expanded cinema I have surveyedcinema as performance, as object, as concept, as any alternative material that could serve as projector, filmstrip, screen, etc.are unified by the elemental conception of the film machine that has come out of the ontological thrust of experimental cinema across its history. Film in its conventional form is thus placed in a privileged position vis--vis expanded cinema. The film machine becomes the central reference point for the expanded works I have discussed, as do the aesthetic qualities or traits that that machine represents (those kinds of sensory and cognitive experiences that have been privileged in experimental-film practice and discourse, such as those produced by flickering, or editing, or flatness). In retaining allusions to the film medium in its conventional state, such works extend the medium-specific investigations of materialist film even though they take on apparently hybrid
57. Hollis Frampton, Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium, Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 198687), pp. 277 and 292. 58. Frampton, For a Metahistory of Film, p. 134. 59. Hollis Frampton, Letter to Donald Richie, in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 160.

48

OCTOBER

forms, even the immaterial or dematerialized ones of paracinema. Hence, while certainly expansive, expanded cinema resisted the loss of films identity among intermedia practices and hybridity. It allowed filmmakers to negotiate between the strict limitations of medium-specificity and the completely open field of expanded-arts possibilities. The last two decades have seen a new environment of intermedia practices and ideas emerge, and with it the familiar vexations for cinemas identity and independence. The spread of digital technology and attendant notions of media convergence, the so-called death of film (especially small-gauge film), the predominance of moving-image art in the gallery, and the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity and skepticism about medium-specificity among cinema-studies academicsall these mark a new period in the history of cinemas ongoing expansion and raise familiar questions about the nature and future of the art form. Once again, experimental cinema finds itself in a unique position relative to these historical developments. The cautionary tone Michelson sounded in 1966 is being echoed by contemporary filmmakers and critics. For example, writing in 2003, the artist and critic Barry Schwabsky argued that the art worlds fascination with cinema actually contributed to experimental films marginalization: . . . What has been peculiar about this recuperation of arts relation to film is that, in terms of the film or cinema part of the equation, it has consistently sidelined the kinds of film that would on the face of it appear most relevant to late-modern and contemporary artistic practicethat is, the various forms of avant-garde, experimental, poetic, materialist and structuralist cinema that have eschewed the conventions of the narrative feature. Instead, the focus has been precisely on narrative features, primarily of the Hollywood variety, secondarily those that arose in the wake of t he Nouvelle Vague t he cinema of Godard, Antonioni, Fassbinder and so on.60 The description of a recent symposium on the relationship between art and film expressed a similar sentiment: even today the experimental film has been unable to develop its own discursive power within the gravitational fields of art and cinema.61 That is, the merging of art and filmin the contemporary moment as in the 1960s and 70sposes a threat to the identity and vitality of experimental cinema. The situation demands that experimental-film culture find a way to seize discursive power and assert itself in the world of moving-image art, new media, and media convergence.
60. Barry Schwabsky, Art, Film, Video: Separation or Synthesis?, in The Undercut Reader, p. 2. 61. From the description of the symposium From Close and Afar: The Interweaving of Art and Cinema Around 1970, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, http://www.museenkoeln.de/museumludwig/default.asp?s=3045 (accessed May 1, 2011).

Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder. Light Spill. 2007. Image courtesy Robischon Gallery.

50

OCTOBER

Expanded cinema, I have suggested, was a way for experimental filmmakers to do just that in the 1960s and 70s. Not surprisingly, then, a new surge of expanded cinematic practices have appeared in the experimental-film world, as has scholarly interest in historical Expanded Cinema and the question of the relationship between experimental film and the other arts. Without abandoning the mult imedia, non- specific concept ion of expanded cinema at the heart of Youngbloods still crucial book, it seems to me, to say expanded cinema today is to refer specifically to the kind of work I have discussed here, which is still being produced by contemporary self-designated experimental filmmakers. Such work, while expanded, has nonetheless been informed by narrower conceptions of the specifically cinematic, though not so narrow as to frame out inter-arts references and intermedia forms. This is because the question of the nature and possibilities of the specifically cinematic has become all the more urgent given the historical circumstances. In the wake of digital medias ascendency, the dismantling of the film machine may no longer be an artistically generative metaphor for expanded cinema, but a realit y that threatens an ent ire art ist ic tradit ion. In response, contemporary expanded cinema has emphasized and celebrated film as a still viable alternative to digital that needs to be protected from extinction.62 One form this response continues to take is the creative reimagining of film in such a way that it can absorb other art forms, or at least interact with them while retaining its legibility as film. About their film installation Light Spill (2006), in which hundreds of feet of decommissioned 16mm film footage is dumped onto the gallery floor by a projector with no takeup reel, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder write of the art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.63 Like Frampton, Gibson and Recoder suggest a reversal of the history and the logic of cinema in the house of art. The ongoing expansion of cinema, including its exploration of the territory of the art world, need not be seen as a crisis in the art of film, but as a means for experimental film to resolve the multiple crises it faces in the new millennium.

62. For more on this, see Jonathan Walley, Not an Image of the Death of Film, in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. David Curtis, A.L. Ress, Duncan White, and Steven Ball (London: Tate Publishing, forthcoming 2011). 63. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Artist Statement: Light Spill, University of WisconsinMilwaukee Art History Department Web site, http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/arthistory/exhibits/ 2011/lightspill_0111.cfm (accessed May 5, 2011).

Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking

Malcolm Turvey: We are here to discuss the various ways digital technologies have, and have not, impacted experimental filmmaking. There was a time, in the mid-1990s, if not before, when some people argued that digital technologies were revolutionary and that they would fundamentally change filmmaking. Now that the dust has settled, or at least started to settle, and we can look back over the last fifteen or twenty years, the digital revolution might not seem like a revolution at all. We want to talk about both what has stayed the same and what has changed in experimental filmmaking thanks to the advent of digital technologies. Ken Jacobs: I think those people were right, but they were premature. They first made that argument about analogue video. But analogue video was not the way. There were people, like myself, who saw it as a great but transient medium. We saw good things being done, but now those things have gone. Turvey: Are you talking about video art? Ken Jacobs: Yes. Federico Windhausen: When video art emerged, was it being discussed as something that experimental filmmakers would have to address? I have always had the sense that experimental filmmakers in the era of analogue video art felt that they could keep their distance from it pretty easily. Flo Jacobs: Thats because the film-developing labs were still functioning. Windhausen: So it wasnt a threat? It was something you could easily avoid? Ken Jacobs: Thats right. Windhausen: Do others recall the situation in the same way? Mark Street: I remember the discussion about who was a video artist and who was a filmmaker, and how they had different purviews. You said the advent of analogue video artso youre talking about the early 1960s? Windhausen: The moment of wider dissemination of the technology in the late 1960s and 70s. Street: In the 1980s, when I went to film school, there was still that distinction, but it started to mean less. People were making choices about shooting on analogue video based on economics, not based on content or aesthetics. When I

OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 5168. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

52

OCTOBER

first went to film school, people would ask, Is it a film, or is it a videotape? But ten years later, it didnt seem to matter as much. Windhausen: Were you around when Canyon resisted distributing on video? Street: Well, some at Canyon resisted and some didnt. There were some who felt that video was a threat, as you say, and there were younger people who felt that it really didnt matter what medium was being used, that what mattered was the work itself. I remember being pulled both ways. Flo Jacobs: Dont you think the change really occurred when cheaper editing software like Final Cut Pro became readily available? Before that, there was Avid, but Avid was expensive. Then Final Cut Pro changed everything. Turvey: When was that, Flo? Flo Jacobs: 1999. Windhausen: Right around the time that cheap digital cameras came on the market. Lynne Sachs: I think that was a revolution in terms of access. Because of its accessibility, more people could enjoy the freedom of using the new media for creative thinking. People started to believe you could be a filmmaker without being a director, and that making a film could be an autonomous act from start to finish, as painting and writing are. That was very radical, because before that, there was a hierarchy in filmmaking (except among experimental filmmakers who tried to work outside that hierarchy). I think there has been a very important shift in societys understanding of filmmaking. People realize that the resources are there to do it individually. This democratization is not just a political shift; its a paradigmatic shift in that it allows filmmaking to be the product of a truly individual vision, as Stan Brakhage and others always advocated. Windhausen: But hadnt the Bolex 16mm film camera already enabled a lot of what youre talking about? It facilitated a shift from thinking about becoming a director within the industry to thinking about oneself as a creative artist working individually outside the industry. The difference in the digital era is that theres already a long history of experimental filmmaking, and that history has valorized and legitimized the notion of the individual film artist that you are talking about, whereas when the Bolex emerged, people like Maya Deren in the 1940s had to stake their claim to being a film artist. Street: Theres another history at work too, and thats the history of video art, which is a half step toward what you are talking about. Because analogue video was a popular, anti-high-art medium, it spoke to the idea that you could own your own camera and respond to television and things like that. Ken Jacobs: The first video cameras were priceythey werent that inviting. I remember one thing that shocked me was their low resolution. Ralph Hocking ran a video center, a lab upstate, and in his own work he consciously exploited videos low-res rather than imitating film.

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

53

Sachs: The shame of the digital world is that as the machinery gets more and more advanced, there is an attempt to mirror reality as closely as possible. That is what I think is so disturbing, whereas the avant-garde is not trying to mirror reality. Were trying to shape, investigate, play with, and sculpt it. High-definition is so unappealing to me because of that. Luis Recoder: You used the word sculpt, and I think that film is becoming more of an art because of these crises. The digital wants to emulate film, and it is in a crisis: it doesnt have a history. While that is going on, filmmakers like myself can work with film in a way that maybe you werent able to at one time. Its a different kind of a possibility, I think. Turvey: Do you mean that digital technologies show filmmakers ways to use celluloid that they might not have thought of before, ways that emphasize films differences from high-definition digital video? Recoder: Yes, filmmakers and projection artists can work with celluloid in ways that are highlighted and assisted by this crisis, rather than evading or negating it. Sachs: What do you mean by crisis? Recoder: Well, you were saying that youre not crazy about high-definition, right? Im not crazy about it either. For instance, when you go to a film festival and bring your video, you dont know what its going to look like when its projected, whereas with film, you have a better idea of what its going to look like and you can work with the projectionist to get it right. Video artists can sometimes do the same thing. They can run tests to see the quality of the projection. But often, you take your video to Sundance, or international film festivals, and its a bummer when you see it projected. With the medium of film, you have more control. I mean, you can even bring your own projector! Ken Jacobs: I disagree. I cant imagine a level of control over film that compares to the control you have with video. Flo Jacobs: Except that you had fantastic problems switching over to PAL and Progressive Scan. You had disasters. Ken Jacobs: Yes, there were problems. But lets not forget the computer. It is this fantastic brain that can do anything. It gives just incredible freedom and control. Sachs: For a while, one was totally dependent upon institutions in the city to convert from NTSC to PAL. But these days I can do much better conversions using Final Cut Pro and some other compressors than they can do. It takes a little while, but it looks perfect, going from PAL to NTSC or the other way. Windhausen: But youre talking about the advantages of video in production and postproduction, while Luis was talking about control over projection enabled by film. Ken Jacobs: But there is a forward momentum with digital video, an urgency thats lacking with film, which is just dying. There are only two film-processing labs in the city now. These problems with video will cease to be problems after a while. Video is constantly improving.

54

OCTOBER

Flo Jacobs: But the other problem with digital video is preservation. Whats going to happen in ten years? Ken Jacobs: The labs tell us that the only way to preserve digital video is to put it on filmon 35mm. [Laughter.] Sachs: There are also the changes in our thinking brought about by these new technologies. The practical changes they occasion are a big part of our daily lives. But the changes in our thinking are harder to grasp. The other day, I was watching experimental documentaries by students from Union Docs, and I asked them a question about sound, and every single student had downloaded their sound from the Internet. For them, it wasnt about listening, about the surprise of finding something in the world around you. Instead, they seem to want to work in a cleaner comfort zone. Of course, we all work with found footage, and I adore that. But the surprises that come from working in the field teach you something about who you are in the world. I asked these people, who are all in their early-to-mid-twenties, if they ever go out into the world to listen to and record sounds. Their answer was no, for the most part. For them, filmmaking is more about acquiring the world than engaging with it. Windhausen: Mark, do you find this with your students? Street: I can make an analogy with books. I was talking to a student the other day and I said: Youre looking for a book and its in the intellectual vicinity of these other books, so you go to the library to look for the book, and if the book isnt there, there might be other books close by that could be of interest. But it was an alien concept to this studentthe idea of wandering and browsing and letting the library take you where it will. Nowadays there really is a more acquisitional approach to sound and images. Its more like Im looking for this; let me go and get it rather than Im going out to shoot and maybe Ill happen on something by chance. I think thats a weakness of the digital age. Ken Jacobs: They live only in their own times. They are not listening to the world, just making something out of the computer. Turvey: Hold on. Isnt it possible to discover something by chance on the Internet as well? Sachs: Thats what they said to me. They said, We find the most amazing things on the Internet, and I said, Oh, I spend plenty of time on the Internet, I know! But they think: why go listen to the birds if you can download all these bird sounds without even knowing which birds they are? Turvey: Lynne and Mark, if I understand your work correctly, you use multiple formats to shoot on, right? Do you do so because each medium offers different possibilities or advantages? Street: For me, yes. I was in the basement today looking at a 16mm print that Craig Baldwin sent to me. I had to go downstairs and thread up the projector just

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

55

to look at it, and there are limitations involved in that, just as there are limitations involved in shooting 16mm and Super 8mm film. I try to let those limitations speak, while also enjoying the freedom of the digital age. These days I transfer everything to digital, so I feel I can go out and shoot a roll of film and its OK to be defined by that roll for two minutes and forty seconds. But then I transfer it to digital and that opens up other possibilities. Ken Jacobs: What moves you to still shoot film? Street: I like the texture of it; I like the fact that when you shoot a roll of film, it becomes a specific entity and its unlike any other thing. It has its own weight and characteristics. You know? Thirty-six exposures: a roll of still film becomes like a little narrative, a little vignette of sorts. And I think thats useful. I remember when I first started shooting videotape, I would fall asleep looking at my footage. [Laughter.] There was so much of it. I had six hours of footage. It used to be I had two rolls! Youd made it work, youd make it count. So I like those limitations, I like being hemmed in, because making work is always about overcoming the obstacles. Turvey: You are also interested in 35mm film, right? Thats fairly unusual within the experimental-film world. Didnt you use 35mm film trailers in Trailer Trash [2009]? Where does that come from, that attraction to 35mm? Street: Well, for a very brief and misguided period of time, I thought I could circumvent the fact that 16mm was disappearing in the early 1990s. I made a film called Sliding Off the Edge of the World [2000] in 35mm in the hope that I could maintain the purity, such as it is, of the filmgoing experience. I was motivated, in part, by the experience of trying to show my films on 16mm. I would pay for a 16mm print and spend a lot of time and money figuring it out, only to be asked: Whats that? or, Dont you have that on tape? Or to be told: The projectionist is not here. So I made a few 35mm films, and as I worked at a lab, it was easy for me to do that. However, Trailer Trash was finished in mini-DV, and I dont really have any desire to work in 35mm anymore. Windhausen: Ken, you did a couple of found-footage films on 35mm as well, right? Is it Disorient Express [1996] or Georgetown Loop [1996] thats available on 35mm? Ken Jacobs: Both are. Windhausen: For the size of the image, because they are widescreen? Ken Jacobs: Thats right. I hear what youre saying about the intensity of using film. It costs so much, the meter is always running, and I honor that. But I enjoy having too much stuff on video, and then looking through it and seeing what unexpected thing I find, something I just couldnt plan. Turvey: So you find the extra volume of material facilitates creativity and surprise? Ken Jacobs: I look at that stuff the way you might look at the world with a film cam-

56

OCTOBER

Mark Street. Trailer Trash. 2009.

era. You pick it up from the world, but Im looking at this already-recorded stuff to see whats there that can suddenly be made vital. Turvey: Luis, if I understand your projection process, you use 16mm film exclusively, is that right? Recoder: And 35mm. Turvey: You are from the youngest generation of filmmakers in this room, and so that means you would have gone to school in the 1990s, would that be right? Recoder: Yeah, mid-90s. Turvey: Can you say something about why you work with celluloid film? Recoder: I think it has a lot to do with what Lynne said earlier about the availability of media. Digital made celluloid film more available. You can now find it in a flea market for really cheap. I entered filmmaking at that moment in the mid-to-late-90s when the hierarchy between celluloid film and digital wasnt there. I didnt have that kind of baggage, the view that one medium is more authentic than the other. It was more about availability and economic factors. Working with a projector and found footage, by chance I became a projectionist. I was going to festivals and was invited into the booth to set up my projector, and I learned about projection that way. I discovered possibili-

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

57

ties within the realms of the theater and the booth, and the division between whats hidden and whats not, the apparatus and the audience. So it was really a schooling through the rear end of cinema, through the projection booth, which happened by chance. It wasnt that I wanted to make films; it was more that I was led into it. Windhausen: Guy Sherwin says that as wellthat you can now buy film projectors really cheap. For him, digital has made it easier to work in film projection and performance than it was before, because you can just go on eBay and buy all these cast-aside film projectors that nobody wants anymore. Luis, youve been appearing at what I assume are expanded-cinema festivals. Have you seen other artists at these festivals working in video in ways that run parallel to, or in interesting contrast with, what you do in film? Recoder: Not as much, but there are a few people working with old analogue video equipment from the 70s, so there is a revival, a backwards gaze at the medium of video itself. I think its because its so hands-on. Even in music there is a revival of the old analogue hands-on process. Its all due to performance, the desire to perform with the medium. Earlier, I used the word control, but really I think its an improvisational process. Theres control in the sense that you know what different things are going to do, but then the

Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder. Untitled. 2008.

58

OCTOBER

performance opens that up into messier, less controlled ways of working with the material. Windhausen: So in your experience of going to these festivals, there has been a revival of expanded cinema largely in the photochemical-film and analoguevideo modes, but not so much in the digital-video mode? Recoder: I havent really seen digital video, but Im sure it exists, more so in the art world than in the film world. At film festivalsnot just at expanded-cinema events but also traditional film festivalsthey are opening up spaces for installation art and performance, and my partner Sandra Gibson and I fall into that niche. A lot of festivals, even big ones like Sundance, want to highlight materiality. In a strange way they are becoming structural materialists, albeit unconsciously. They invite us because they want materiality, again due to the crisis occasioned by digital media. With digital media, there is nothing material to see or touch as a medium. Sachs: I think one of the interesting directions that the digital world is taking us toward is a fetishism of decay. We miss decay, so we have to create the activity of something physical breaking apart or aging. In the world of architecture they create furniture that looks faux-worn and antique. It is very peculiar to me that there are digital effects that can create scratches and dust. We dont want things to age. Nevertheless, we miss the chemical reactions, the fact that physical things change, so we simulate decay. Its so strange. The desire for decay is a nostalgia for the aura of the original and its physical transformation. In digital, the original isnt transformed, but we want it to be. I dont necessarily aspire to this myself, but then I find myself including things like the flash-out flames, and I use found footage because it adds a texture that gives me so much delight. I think it does the same for the audience, who say, Oh, I really like that, because it doesnt look realistic, it doesnt look like television or digital video. Thats why theres a desire for decay. Windhausen: But its also a desire for the material markers of the filmstrip, as in the simulated end-of-roll light flares you now see in those spots for the Sundance channel. Things that experimental filmmakers first discovered about film or liked to reveal to an audience are now so easy to achieve digitally. Street: But isnt it a nostalgia on the part of the younger generation for something that never existed? The great experimental filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola said that he has no hankering for film. He lived it, but his daughter who didnt live it, Sophia Coppola, wants to shoot on film all the time. I used to have this idea that you could go out and get projectors, Dumpster-dive, buy stuff on eBay, etc., and create a DIY punk film aesthetic. Then a student brought in an old camera, a regular 8mm camera, and it was rigged in a weird way with a funny magazine, like a regular 8mm magazine that you would pop in. I had never seen anything like it, so we poked around on the Internet and discovered you could buy those magazines through a Web site.

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

59

There was a guy in L.A. who was tinkering with and remaking them and then selling them for $70 or $80 each. I realized there was something faux-nostalgic about this. It wasnt about finding the detritus of the culture and using it. Rather, it was about re-creating it, in an anachronistic way, like wearing a pince-nez or jodhpurs or something like that. Turvey: So decay and obsolescence have become commodified and clichd? Street: Thats how I felt, that people are paying too much for these things. Why not just use a video camera thats cheap and thats the lingua franca now, you know? Ken Jacobs: But the marks of these older technologies mean something. They ring a bell, they do something. I studied decay, OK? My Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son [196971] is really about decay, among a lot of other things. It wasnt about nostalgia, it was about asking, What is this old stuff? What is it made of? What is its character as a series of light impressions? Windhausen: There is a video by the art ist Cor y Arcangel called Personal Film [2008], which is full of the effects you are talking about, but he made it on a desktop digital imaging program and had it transferred to 16mm film. It has flame-outs and scratches and count-down leader, and when you look at it in the installation spaceit was at Team Gallery a couple Ken Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The of years agoits a 16mm proPipers Son. 196971. jector projecting a 16mm film. If you dont read t he text about it, then you dont know that it was all done on a digital desktop. For better or for worse, hes someone whose work reflects how that younger generation works with digital imagery. Ken Jacobs: But thats to make nonsense out of this stuff. The flameoutsI kept them in my films for a number of reasons. I wanted to say, This is the end; I cant shoot anymore, because I have no other roll of film. But I also wanted to say, This is film; this is the character of film. What Im showing you are unedited rolls from a camera; I left the flash frames inthat was part of the statement. And now you can make it happen digitally, and it doesnt connote anything. It doesnt signify. Its just an effect. Sachs : Thats why I think that the flash-frame only exists as a conceit, as a metaphor. Its no longer indicative of something material. Windhausen: Luis, you choose not to show your audience what youre doing in

60

OCTOBER

terms of the photochemical film processes and the projection processes that youre working with. Whats your sense of how they understand the images that youre creating, given the lack of knowledge about photochemical film that weve been talking about. Do you care? Recoder: Yeah, I do. When I started doing projector performances, a lot of the people who came to see the show were let down because there was no performance in the traditional sense. I wasnt in front of the screen doing things. Nowadays, when you are talking about expanded-cinema shows, thats what they expectthere are a lot of younger artists putting projectors in front of the audience and in front of the screen, so that you can see what theyre doing and can see the effects of what theyre doing. I try to work with

Ken Jacobs. Celestial Subway Lines. 2004.

the audiences anticipation of this kind of performance and their subsequent disappointment, where the whole spectacle maintains itself as an illusion and then breaks down. The audience is confused about what theyre really seeing and whats really happening. Is it film? Is it video? I work within the space of that confusion. Windhausen: But does what youre doing remain, then, a mystery for the audience? Recoder: Slightly. We reveal it sometimes afterwards, during the Q&A. Windhausen: Ken, at times you have shown audiences what youre doing and at times you deliberately hide, or stand in front of, the apparatus. Ken Jacobs: Thats only with the Nervous Magic Lantern. I dont want people to

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

61

think that they understand it because they see its parts. It is completely mystifying to me, doing it, and I dont want an easy answer for them. Windhausen: Do you care whether they think they see a film performance or a video performance? Some of my students get it wrong if they dont see the apparatus. Ken Jacobs: No, I do care. I dont want them to think that theyve seen video, although Im not consistent. We were in Paris, and the interest in seeing the machinery was so strong, I just opened it up. I want people to realize that it really is a magic lantern. Thats all it is. The result is coming from these primitive means. To have someone think its video would be disappointing. Now, some of it is being recorded on video. There is a DVD of a piece I did with John Zorn, Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise [2004], so I guess I dont think that its always so important that one see the machine. I also want the effects onscreen to be appreciated for themselves. Flo Jacobs: But you cant record it at all; its impossible. Every time we rehearse, its different, no matter what you do. Ken Jacobs: What Flo is saying is that each time I do it, I improvise. I cant repeat what I did a previous time. Street: Im just wondering: if flash-frames are film ephemera and Joan Jonass vertical roll is early video ephemera, what are the ephemera for digital video? What do people show when theyre showing us the subconscious of the medium? Windhausen: Ken shows artifacting, pixelation . . . Street: Ernie Gehr shows the space between the frames, as in Crystal Palace [2002]. I guess thats it. Windhausen: What were talking about are the medium-specific gestures that are typically made when a medium emerges and artists want to see what are, for example, the unique artifacts of decay within that medium, or something like that, right? Street: Right, things that remain particular and idiosyncratic to that medium. Windhausen: Cameras these days are like computers in that they have built-in obsolescence, like laptops. After a certain number of years, a camera is going to be off the market and obsolete. You and Lynne still work with mini-DV rather than HD, so youre already old-school. Ken, meanwhile, has moved on to high-definition (hes the youngest of all of us). [Laughter.] Last year Ken had a Creative Vado High Definition handheld pocket camera, and now hes already got a new one that Ive never even seen before. It doesnt even have a viewfinder or a screen! So the question becomes: why bother doing mediumspecific work when your medium is obsolete within a year? Ken Jacobs: Young people, I believe, are sampling. They encounter something, they get an idea, and then they go for something else. The idea of making a discrete work that begins here and ends there is pass. Windhausen: At the Oberhausen Film Festivals retrospective of his work this year,

62

OCTOBER

Fred Worden said something similar when discussing his newer work in video. Filmmakers can now continually revise their work, because they have it on a hard drive. You just look up a particular file and continue working on it. The open work is becoming more of a norm now. Street: I think that openness is good. I always encourage my studentsthis is Final Cut Pro talkto create a new sequence every time they sit down to edit, as if they are reinventing the film every time. Filmmaking was linear; it involved a progression. As you edited it, the film hopefully got better, shorter, clearer. But in the digital age, you can sit down on a Tuesday and reinvent your film and on a Wednesday reinvent it again; you are not bound by a linear progression. Windhausen: You dont have the point of termination of having to pay for the print, for example. Street: There was also an investment in every one of your gestures. A splice had better be good, because it was costly to go back. But with digital, you can experiment and play around because nothing is irrevocable. Very few of my students take me up on that, though. Its usually still one sequence that they invest in and keep trying to improve. Sachs: There is a term used today, which is non-destructive. The way we work now is that everything is protected. Youre never really working with what you did yesterday but rather with a duplicate of it, so that if you dont like what you do today you can always go back to what you did yesterday. But when you were editing with film, you didnt have that freedom. You were working with a work print, and if you cut it, of course you could put it back together, but most of the time, if you did intricate cutting, you were going towards something and you werent going to break up all those little frames again. It was essentially destructive; there was no return. But now we want the constant capability of returning to something as if we were striving towards perfection and any risk we take might lead us astray from that perfect end. Ken Jacobs: Are you saying this is positive or negative? Sachs: I dont know. Its positive because Im used to it now, but I dont know if it makes me more risk-averse or less. Turvey: So if its so easy to alter and go back, how do you know when a film is finished? What is the criterion, now, for a finished film? Ken Jacobs: Oh, wait a minute. Thats nothing new. One simply senses that it is done, just like with a painting or a poem or anything else. You step away and its done. I dont think thats changed. I want to say this: Kinos Avant-Garde 3 DVD contains Danse Macabre [Dudley Murphy, 1922], The Petrified Dog [Sidney Peterson, 1948], Plague Summer [Chester Kessler, 1951], The Death of a Stag [Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1951], Image in the Snow [Willard Maas, 1952]all of these could have been shot on video. There are very few films that pertain to the twenty-four frames per second, or sixteen frames per second, of the film strand. It takes some of Brakhages work, or Kubelkas, to say, Yeah, that had to be shot on film.

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

63

Windhausen: What about Wavelength [Michael Snow, 1967]? Ken Jacobs: Wavelength could have been shot on video, too. Windhausen: Snow might say that you go from a long shot to the close-up of the postcard with the waves, which is a pyramid-shaped trajectory, whereas the projection from the film projector to the screen forms an inverse pyramid. Street: But doesnt that concern projection rather than being shot on video? There is the distinction between showing something on a small screen versus a large screen, and the distinction between shooting something on film and video. For example, I saw Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [Chantal Akerman, 1975] at Film Forum, and I had only seen it on VHS on the small screen. When you see it big, it all comes together, and when you see it small, its nothing. Its a question of kind not degree. Ken Jacobs: Scale is enormously important. Its the same thing with music. Scale is significant. Windhausen: Interesting. So what youre saying is that for a large number of experimental films, there is not much lost if you watch them on video? Ken Jacobs: No, I am saying that there is nothing lost if you make them on video; there is if you watch them on a monitor. Windhausen: Oh, OK. Now, related to this and to distribution issues, there seem to be more festivals showing experimental work now than ever before. So do you find that your work is being disseminated more than ever before? To what degree are the festivals more important or more prominent than exhibition venues like Anthology Film Archives? Also, none of you have films on the Web. None of you have Web sites where full, high-definition versions of your work can be seen. Why not? Ken Jacobs: Im unhappy when things are shown in less than optimum conditions. It makes me very unhappy, and thats why its really important to make hard copies. Hard copies exist when people really care about work, people who want to have a DVD or something. Windhausen: And is more of your work being seen, not just at festivals but in venues that are interested in showing works by Mark Street or Ken Jacobs, now that they can find a DVD to rent? Ken Jacobs: Yeah, and they can find us. Windhausen: OK, so how many of you travel with your work? One of the core values of experimental film is the temporary community of the theatrical audience, the people in the seats who are watching your film. If film exhibition becomes Web-based, you lose that temporary community, potentially. Is that something that you are reluctant to let go of ? Do you care? Street: Im reluctant. When youre in your house, youre surrounded by the things that you love, that you boughtbourgeois trappingsand I think youre less able to take risks. But when you go sit in a theater, theres a social contract. Im watching Jeanne Dielman, Im bored, but Im not going to get up. Im going to stick it out because theres a social contract and Im part of the temporary com-

64

OCTOBER

munity you mention. I have a film festival at the end of every semester with my students, and the students ask, Why? Why do we all have to get together at 7 p.m. on a Thursday? Cant I just look at a disc, cant you just give me a disc? Is it going to be on the Web? Its a very telling, contemporary question. Ken Jacobs: And when they look at a disc, they skip through the film, the fuckers. [Laughter.] Street: I like the social part of it. I think its important to be in the same room with the work and experience it as a group in the dark. Ken Jacobs: I disagree. Its always just me and the work. Im not even with Flo when Im watching this thing. Im with the person who conceived and presented it, just like reading a book. Im alone. I dont want people around. Sachs: You asked about whether we travel with our work. I actually make a lot of effort to travel with my work, and its extremely disruptive to family life and work life. But its very important to me. It keeps it alive. It makes it human. Many times I am paid an honorarium but they say, We want you to be here, and its not very much money. Nevertheless, I do my best to go with the films if I can. Its worth it to me to feel that aliveness the way musicians do, or theater people. Its not as if my work is all over the place in stores and it has this productive presence in society. Windhausen: I can imagine younger filmmakers thinking that Web distribution is fine because they will get feedback from blog comments or things like that. But I havent seen it. I still find that younger filmmakers want a body of people responding directly to their work. Ken Jacobs: I would very much love for my stuff to be available. Free is OK with me, although every so often I realize thats not realistic. We need the money, there should be some money coming back, but really I just want the work simply out there, and as good as it can be. Flo Jacobs: What Ken really wants is to travel with live works, otherwise it doesnt make any sense. Its easy for him to just put a DVD in the mail, so the only reason to travel is to perform. Street: For you, Luis, the DVD does not exist, right? Recoder: No, we have DVDs. We like to have our work seen by as many people as possible, and not everyone can invite us, not everyone has those resources. Our work has been shown on DVDs in installations, at places where they couldnt invite us to go and do performances. For me, the medium of digital video is irrelevant; its just another distribution format. What we do is not video art. Some people might see it that way, but thats not really a direction that Im interested in. * Ken Jacobs: Im someone who really likes working with accidents, and to me, video is a vast accident, you know, unplanned, unexpected, wow! Turvey: Can you give examples?

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

65

Ken Jacobs: Well, I work with these miniature digital cameras, and I cant see through them. For years I worked without a reflex lens, and it was a major thing in my life when I could afford to buy one with a built-in viewer. These miniature digital cameras are cheap models, unbelievable models. They focus by themselves, they get the right light levels by themselves. You press a button to turn them on and another to take a picture. Yes, there is a lot they dont do, but its so much fun exploring what they can do, much of which is unexpected. So, Im really grateful. Turvey: Ken, would you ever go back to shooting on film? Ken Jacobs: Im not inclined to. Before I worked in digital video, I had pretty much stopped filming. One reason is that I had accumulated so much footage and I just didnt want to add to the number of unfinished works. They were very hard to finish; I never had the money. Flo Rounds a Corner [1999] was the first video I did, but it made finishing Star Spangled to Death [19572004] as a video thinkable. Forty years, or something like that, after I started it on film, I was able to finish it as a video, and Im so grateful. Windhausen: You were talking earlier, Mark, about medium-specific gestures like the vertical roll, and I was thinking of work like Paul Sharitss from the 70s, which was accompanied by Sharitss theoretical statements, which would undergird, or run parallel to, the work he was doing. In the digital era, while there are academics who theorize about digital media, it doesnt seem to be the case that experimental filmmakers are taking that step. As they move into digital, they dont appear to be writing theoretical texts about the properties, possibilities, or capacities of the medium, or making work that says, Maybe digital is this. Instead, they seem to be working intuitively with the materials, and the theoretical stuff is left largely to academics. Street: Its interesting to put it that way. I wonder if its because everything seems possible in the digit al world, so filmmaker s dont feel the need to highlight the limitations in the way that they did with film. Ken Jacobs: It takes an exquisitely disturbed person to dwell on what they cant do. [Laughter.] Street: I think its interesting, the idea of theories or manifestos about the propert ies of a medium. Think of Fred Campers The Trouble with Video [1985] and Ken Jacobs. Flo Rounds a Corner. 1999. the update. I dont agree with him, but its interesting that he compared film and analogue

66

OCTOBER

video. I dont know that any filmmaker is doing that with digital. Its too easy, in the digital world, to think that the latest thing is the new language and is not to be questioned. I see that right now with the 16:9 aspect ratio, for instance. It used to be that we had 4:3 or 16:9, that there was a choice. But in the last two years, Ive noticed with my students that its not a choice anymore. They use 16:9, and thats it. Windhausen: So can we agree that the filmmakers here are relatively conservative in that they prefer to show their work in a theatrical projection situation where the temporary community of an audience has to watch the work from beginning to end? Ken Jacobs: And you cant go to the bathroom! [Laughter.] Windhausen: Thats fairly conservative though, right? Flo Jacobs: No, it isnt! Thats not conservative. Windhausen: It is today. Youre conserving it as a tradition. Its a valuable tradition but its a conservative move. Flo Jacobs: Do you want to walk in to the middle of Strangers on a Train [Alfred Hitchcock, 1951]? I dont think so. Is that being conservative? Windhausen: I guess I mean new work. Recoder: I think you can be more radically conservative now in the gallery. There are things that we are doing, my partner and I, that no theater is going to show. They are too long, or too boring, whereas in the gallery you can show them. Windhausen: Youre making gallery work now? Recoder: Yes. Windhausen: But youre in the minority here, is what Im saying. Ken Jacobs: All of us make work that begins at one time and ends at another time. We want it to be seen that way! Sachs : I do have a piece on the Internet called Abecedarium: NYC [2009], and every time that I open it, aspects of it are different. It will speak back to me based on the climate, on how the public participates. Flo Jacobs: In terms of being conservative, I think the

Lynne Sachs. Abecedarium: NYC. 2009.

Roundtable on Experimental Digital Cinema

67

work has to be seen from beginning to end. You cant just stroll in, visit it, and stroll out. You can say the same thing about a painting. You wouldnt want somebody to cut a detail out of a painting at the Met and hang that up, would you? Windhausen: Well, theres a difference between a perpetually open work and one thats finished. Im thinking, as a point of comparison, of new-media artists, who make work thats interactive and continually open to change. It can be entered into and left behind at any point. Flo Jacobs: But thats their concept, thats their work. Windhausen: Another shift is that television is more cinematic, now, in every way, and people emulate the film theater in their homes. Ken Jacobs: Thats good, because what about the kids who are looking at a cluttered monitor while watching a movie in bed? Sachs: Or three movies! Windhausen: Whats wrong with that? the kids would say. Ken Jacobs: Thats right, they would say that. But they would not understand the problem. Sachs: That is a real function of the digital, the fact that people believe that it is just as good an experience to watch more than one thing at once. Ken Jacobs: Multitasking. Sachs: Or multi-watching. Its not even a task, because theyre not having to do something. Its a more is better attitude. Windhausen : In relation to this, I was thinking, Luis, that what Ive seen at expanded-cinema festivals is a lot of work that is ambient, where I have the sense that the artist expects you to dip in and out of it in a relatively aleatory and arbitrary way, whereas what Im accustomed to in single-screen theatrical, experimental films is having my attention be directed from beginning to end. Ken Jacobs: OK, there was this guy named Andy Warhol [Laughter], and he introduced background paintings to convivial meetings, with people drinking and talking in front of something that looked expensive. That is a huge tradition now. I call it stuntismfifty paintings of Marilyn Monroe or whatever. Its not about asking people to learn how to see and to look at something very intently. Turvey: But there are different kinds of work, right? So, obviously, your work demands and requires an intense perceptual engagement. But thats not true of other kinds of work, or some television shows, or other things that one might consume on a smaller screen. Ken Jacobs: There are households where the TV is the first thing on and the last thing off. Turvey: What I mean is that there are different viewing modes appropriate to different kinds of work. Just because people are watching three things at the same time on small screens doesnt mean they are watching them inappropriately.

68

OCTOBER

For example, it would be foolish to sit and watch a CNN broadcast with the perceptual intensity that one would watch a work you make. Ken Jacobs: Yes, I think we are what they call fascists. We want to dominate your complete attention. Recoder: I think thats what you were asking about, Federico, the aleatory, in and out perceptual experience of a certain kind of performance. Allowing that sort of open play and knowing that you have audiences who have all kinds of attention spans is to be anti-fascist, I think. And when you take out narrative and images, you are completely lost. One of the things that brought me to the avant-garde was the experience of viewing. I felt that I could walk in and walk out of it, not physically but perceptually. It allowed me to be in a space where there is a confusion between Am I making this? Or is this making me? Windhausen: But you are articulating something very different from what these three filmmakers do in their single-screen works. Maybe youre an exception, Ken, but most of the work that youve all made has a beginning, middle, and end, and you place a value on directing the viewer through the work. But with expanded-cinema pieces, as Luis has said, its the viewer making the work in an aleatory process that is equal to or of more value than being directed through the work. Ken Jacobs: I dont direct anybody. I am fascinated, and if I remain fascinated from beginning to end, thats all the direction that goes into it. Street: But Federico, there was ambient work that you dipped into and out of in the 50s and 60s. I dont know that its technological. Windhausen: It wasnt the dominant mode. Im talking about dominant modes within experimental cinema. Street: So you think the dominant mode of experimental cinema today is aleatory? Windhausen: No, I think its the dominant mode of expanded cinema. Street: Right, but I think thats a style, and I dont think its any greater today than it was in 1969, or 1959, even. Windhausen: Well, its certainly more popular today than it was back then. Street: Maybe, but there has always been artwork that is non-directive, that allows people to engage it with various degrees of attention. It would be interesting to compare this new paradigm, as you describe it, to Christmas on Earth [Barbara Rubin, 1963], or something. Windhausen: Im not saying that those precedents dont exist; Im just saying that they werent as prominent as they are now. Recoder: Im interested in the word Federico used, conservative. Im wondering where thats coming from, as if you were trying to pin us all down. Windhausen: I was talking about the theatrical situation with the temporary community and everyone looking at the same screen at the same time. Thats a long-standing value within the tradition of experimental film, one that I hope continues. But it is conservative from the perspective of the new-media artist. Street: Im conservative in that sense. Ill sign.

Assimilating Video

FEDERICO WINDHAUSEN
At the end of the 1990s, New York Citys experimental-film scene seemed to be undergoing a revitalization, sparked by alternative screening venues such as the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema on the Lower East Side and Ocularis in Williamsburg, as well as programming initiatives at local museums, including The Cool World, the Whitneys extensive survey of American experimental film and video art. A roundtable of critics, curators, and practitioners, convened in 2000 by The Village Voice to consider this development, gave the overall impression of a thriving community with a catholic appreciation of different moving-image media. When critic J. Hoberman asked the group whether the film-video distinction was still even an issue, the answers were fairly prosaic, touching on the preference for format hybridity among students and the lack of acceptable video projection in classrooms. Doubtless aware of the long history of internal dissent and cross-disciplinary carping within such circles, Hoberman capped the whole exchange by labeling it very polite.1 Presumably also aware that medium-specificity had functioned as a discursive flash point for many years in experimental-film communities, Hoberman noted, in a brief postscript published later, that the unexpected popularity of the MoMAs Big As Life retrospective of 8mm experimental film, along with such other instances as Stan Brakhages frame-by-frame painting or the very different projection pieces orchestrated by Ken Jacobs and Luis Recoder . . . served as an example of film outliving its death.2 Roughly six months later, in The New York Press, critic and programmer Ed Halter also addressed the continuing relevance of photochemical film, but the position he articulates sharply contrasts with the roundtables picture of equable pluralism. In a mixed review of Views from the Avant-Garde, the New York Film Festivals annual experimental-film sidebar, Halter disputes the value of sustaining and supporting experimentation in celluloid: Unlike the dynamic Video Festival [held at the same venue the previous summer], which screened everything from subcultural docudramas to structural feminist essays to manic performance tapes, the film-only
1. 2. J. Hoberman, Attack of the Mutants, The Village Voice (March 14, 2000), p. 116. J. Hoberman, Urban Legends, The Village Voice (March 28, 2000), p. 113.

OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 6983. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

70

OCTOBER

Views from the Avant-Garde plays out one long, somber note of funereal formalism. The videomakers look both forward and back in time for inspiration, while almost every experimental film here wallows in deathof-film nostalgia. Theres also the intrinsic limits of a dying medium. Only so many times can one gush about the colors of Super 8, the possibilities of found-footage collage, or the Tinkertoy wonders of emulsion-scratching and hand-processing before most of the films seem like unadventurous repetitions of familiar formal elements. The current avant-boom is decisively multiformat. While there may always be a few new hardline celluloid geniuses in the retro genre of experimental film, perhaps its time to concede that, for film, the experiment is over.3 This polemic is less interesting for its reduction of experimental film to a retro genre than for the historical trajectory it proposes. When making the claim that every medium with intrinsic limits reaches a terminal point, Halter provides his own version of a narrative of medium-specific ascension and decline that began to appear with greater frequency in writing on avant-garde film around the 1970s. The appeal of such a chronicle lies partly in its tidy finality, and in retrospect, the timing of its reemergenceduring a moment of rapidly increasing interest in relatively affordable digital-video equipment and editing software among experimental filmmakersis telling. It suggests that, when experimental-film culture perceives itself to be moving away from its reliance on a formerly dominant set of materials or technologies, those who criticize contemporary work on aesthetic grounds will seek to support their views with generalizations about the end of a particular history. Over a decade later, one still reads that digital technology generated for experimental filmmakers a crisis, which represented the last of a series of shocks that have rattled avant-garde film since the mid-70s.4 And yet, by its 2010 edition, Views had become so multiformat that only one its many multiple-artist programs was composed entirely of films; it could no longer be characterized or caricatured as the last prominent defender of the belief, articulated most recently by scholar Jonathan Walley, that among avant-garde filmmakers . . . film is the center of artistic practice.5 In expanding to allow contemporary film and video to
3. Ed Halter, Views from the Avant-Garde, The New York Press (October 11, 2000), http:// www.nypress.com/article-2547-views-from-the-avant-garde.html (accessed March 1, 2011). The 2000 edition of Views, which Halter was not reviewing in its entirety, included films by Mary Beth Reed, Barbara Sternberg, Kerry Laitala, David Matarasso, Janie Geiser, Dietmar Brehm, and Mark LaPore, among others. The curators were (and still are) Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith. 4. David E. James, Imposing Technologies, Artforum 48, no. 9 (May 2010), p. 104. James is addressing modes of production in particular. He describes the mid-1970s as the moment when agitational identity politics coincided with the emergence of videotape to superannuate medium-specific structural film. 5. Jonathan Walley, Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde, in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing/Afterall, 2008), p. 189. The all-film program at Views included work by Nathaniel Dorsky, Christopher Becks, Robert Beavers, Ute Aurand, David Gatten, Jonathan Schwartz, Tomonari Nishikawa, Malena Szlam, Eve Heller, Peter Herwitz, and Jim Jennings.

Assimilating Video

71

co-exist more or less equally, Views participated in a more broadly based transformation, also on display at festivals such as Ann Arbor and Oberhausen, where an affiliation with experimental-film culture is not seen as incompatible with programming that combines digital and analogue sources for moving images. Because many older practitioners initially trained in film now submit work in digital formats on a regular basis, the curators of these events have not been forced to choose between established filmmakers and those who represent younger generations in order to accommodate video. In addition, the increased reliance on video has facilitated the inclusion of more artists associated with video art (such as Dani Leventhal at Views in 2010), suggesting that the divide between video makers and filmmakers drawn earlier by Halter has been bridged by a greater degree of diversity and acceptance.6 Yet the curatorial emphasis remains on those who screen their work primarily on the experimental-film circuit, rather than in artworld venues. Few today would dispute that digital video has been assimilated into experimental-film practice, although little has been written about motivating factors or possible determinants. For some, the growing significance of digital video is indicative of a surprising break from formerly dominant attitudes within an experimental-film scene that often derided video in its analogue (and early digital) manifestations; for others, it reflects the extent to which the avant-garde has demonstrated itself capable of reconfiguring its practices and techniques without relinquishing its core values. I hold the latter view, and in what follows, I provide one of many possible prehistories of the contemporary situation, followed by a brief case study focused on Ernie Gehrs digital video Crystal Palace (2002). Both the prehistory and the case study are intended to show where adaptive tendencies appear within experimental-film practice and what they allow filmmakers to continue doing. Since the polemical dimension of avant-garde discourse tends to obscure such tendencies and continuities, I begin by addressing experimental films professed resistance to video. * In contrast to the contemporary critics and theorists who claim that video is no longer the medium with inherent properties7 and that it has no coherent
6. In addition, within the work being produced in digital video by experimental filmmakers, various aesthetic affinities with video art have become more pronounced. Filmmakers are more likely to present their own bodies carrying out performative tasks, for instance, as Scott Stark does in his Chop (2003) and Shape Shift (2004); they are also extending and expanding a tradition of appropriating from television that has not previously been considered a major strain of experimental film. For examples of the latter, see the work of Michael Robinson. 7. Margaret Morse, Alan Rath, Jim Campbell, and Rebecca Bollinger, in Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 19452000, ed. Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid (Berkeley: University of California, 2010), p. 312.

72

OCTOBER

apparatus structure,8 filmmakers offering negative appraisals of the medium have confidently identified its more objectionable qualities since the era of the Sony Portapak. Historically, an especially popular target for the antagonists has been the analogue video image, which lacks the detail, definition, and textures of projected film.9 Among analogue moving-image formats, only film could claim to provide, with consistency and regularity, the option of high-resolution visuals, a feature considered essential by many experimental filmmakers, even those who elected to treat this attribute as a dominant norm worthy of being rejected on a regular basis in favor of degraded or opaque imagery. Filmmakers objections have also gone beyond the aesthetics of the image, encompassing questions of technological design and use, often in order to address the implications of certain normative practices of making and viewing video. Writing in the year of Hobermans and Halters texts, filmmaker Scott Stark lamented that videotape allows for mistakes to be easily erased or corrected and that analogue-video technology generates imagery through some mysterious electronic process that [cant] be seen or touched. In a declarat ion reminiscent of Hollis Framptons well-known comparison of video to the black box of radar, Stark continues: And now, in the year 2000, digital video requires an even more complex and impersonal apparatus, further distancing makers from the physical processes involved in creat ing and recording images. Sophisticated internal motors reduce camera shakiness. Exposure and focus are instantaneous, automatic and exact. Sound precludes a need for visual cues. Images do not exist without the machines and software required to interpret binary data. Technology, driven by commerce and a thirst for efficiency, endlessly attempts to eradicate any lingering traces of humanity from the craft of cinema. History is rewritten to accommodate the trend of the moment. Any personal vision in contemporary moviemaking must now come solely from its content, not its form.10
8. Yvonne Spielmann, Video: From Technology to Medium, Art Journal 65, no. 3 (Fall 2006), p. 58. 9. The following is but one among many similar statements made in the context of a critique of analogue video: Film is a special and unique experiencethe experience of projected light in the dark spacethe interaction of this with the chemistry of the film strip, the intermittent action of the projector mechanism, and the abstraction of the real world through the physics of lens and camera and the chemistry of the film stock and processing. Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris, Call for the Defence of Super 8, quoted in Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, FilmThe Medium About to Be Lost, Independent Eye 10, no. 1 (Fall 1988), p. 5. For a skeptical response to digital video, see Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 914. 10. Scott Stark, The Middle Six Feet: The Birth and Demise of Regular-8 Film and Personal Cinema, initially posted on the Internet discussion list Frameworks on February 8, 2000, now available at: http://www.hi-beam.net/hi-beam/middle6feet.html (accessed March 1, 2011).

Assimilating Video

73

Invoking conceptual oppositions familiar to those who keep track of the rhetorical tendencies of experimental filmmakers, Stark sets the artisanal against the automatic, a term connoting habits and norms of use that follow the dictates of industrial design. Within this particular narrative of decline (countering Halter avant la lettre), the increased alienation of the filmmaker from materially specific operations of construction is also an imposed estrangement from a diverse history of media and practices designated obsolete by commerce. Starks views regarding video would appear to place him in the camp of the celluloid holdouts, yet his filmography includes analogue videos and at least a dozen recent digital pieces. This apparent gap, between a filmmakers evaluative assertions of a given medium and the attitudes that actively shape his work, is the product of an interplay of resistance and adaptability, of theoretical entrenchment and practical compromise, that can be located throughout experimental-film culture since the 1960s. If the dynamic between polemic and practice is less apparent in the era of digital video than it had been in earlier periods, this is due in part to the dwindling number of contemporary filmmakers who write theoretical texts. In order to delve into the workings of this logic, we can look to Starks main objective, which is not to denigrate video but rather to argue for the virtues of the film gauge of regular 8mm. The design of regular 8mm film requires manual treatment of a sort rarely encountered in film practice, and Stark makes clear that this is where he locates its value and specificity as a film gauge. Because standard or regular 8mm film is, in essence, 16mm film with smaller perforations, only one half of the film is exposed in the spools first run through the camera. In order to shoot onto the second half of the strip, the filmmaker must open the camera, flip the roll over, and rethread the film, thereby generating a middle six feet or so that bear the traces of having been directly manipulated. Often displaying fogged images or light flares and sometimes bathed in a sublime, supernatural light, this portion of the film is interpreted by Stark as a unique record of human interaction with the technology, right in the middle of the reel; he sees it as the most distinctive feature of regular-8mm filmmaking. In addition, both of the medium-specific features that Stark discussesthe handling of a roll of regular 8mm and the appearance of supposed errors and mistakes in the processed filmcomplement other qualities frequently associated with 8mm, such as effects of sensuality and material immediacy (said to be less easily generated using the wider film gauges preferred by industrial producers). Thus, the gradual removal of regular 8mm from the amateur film market can be construed as the elimination of a filmic aesthetic with specific psychological, cultural, and ideological meanings. It is a loss first precipitated not by video but within the film industry itself: as Stark sees it, the process of severing of the filmmakers tactile relationship to the medium commences with the invention and marketing of synch-sound Super 8, the format that introduced film cartridges

74

OCTOBER

requiring no reloading and cameras with automatic light meters and fixed-level sound recording. Described as consumer appliances . . . built for maximum automation,11 Super 8 cameras were highly accessible and standardized, leading another filmmaker to label them miniaturized Hollywood apparatus[es].12 For the critics of Super 8, its limited features reflected a strong anti-artisanal current in the consumer or amateur filmmaking market, and yet, as the literature on Super 8 output within experimental film amply demonstrates, many filmmakers chose to work within these perceived constraints, keenly aware of Hobermans point that the whole aesthetic of this form of small-gauge cinema amounted to a series of trade-offs.13 The smaller filmstrips of Super 8 were more difficult to edit than 16mm, for example, but many reconfigured this supposed limitation as an opportunity to edit in camera and subsequently compared this aspect of 8mm production to a kind of writing with the camera14 or sketchbook cinema.15 In addition, for the proponents of Super 8, editing difficulties were far less important than the fact that camera, editing, and projection equipment cost far less than did the equivalents available for wider gauges. As filmmaker Saul Levine describes it, Super 8 was a very low-capital-intensive medium, one with democratic possibilities that remained unrealized with the advent of video and peoples fascination with the electronic image.16 Since video did not offer lowcost, frame-accurate editing equipment or high-quality, consumer-level projectors for many years, even by the late 1990s a Super 8 specialist could assert that the format had empowered filmmakers in ways that video still hasnt.17 This would all seem to confirm the view that experimental filmmakers remained intransigent and uncompromising during the ascent of video. Yet the discourse on Super 8 includes a series of conceptual maneuvers that allowed for the presumed borders between film and video to be reconsidered or circumvented altogether. Instead of rejecting Super 8 cameras for the limits imposed by their point-and-shoot design, for instance, other filmmakers embraced the type of automation Stark critiques, in part because it helped to produce effects of immediacy. In addition, the raw, low-fidelity quality of Super 8 sound recording seemed, in one critics words, truer to the overall Super 8 aesthetic.18 Self-con11. J. Hoberman, The Super-80s, Film Comment 17, no. 3 (May/June 1981), p. 39. 12. Michael Oblowitz, Two Avant-Gardes: Privileged Signs, Empty Signs, Framework 20 (1983), p. 18. Influenced by structural/materialist film theory, this article criticizes New Yorks Super 8 No Wave filmmakers for their adherence to Hollywood style and ideology. The most recent film by its author is the Val Kilmer vehicle The Traveler (2010), distributed by Paramount Pictures. 13. Hoberman, The Super-80s, p. 39. 14. Fred Camper, The Qualities of Eight, Cinematograph 6 (1998), p. 27. 15. Bradley Eros, Atomic Cinema, Cinematograph 6 (1998), p. 35. 16. Saul Levine, quoted in Donna Cameron, Pieces of Eight: Interviews with 8mm Filmmakers, Cinematograph 6 (1998), p. 62. This journal issue is also cited in Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films, ed. Albert Kilchesty (San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art, 1998). 17. Toni Treadway, quoted in Cameron, Pieces of Eight, p. 71. 18. Camper, The Qualities of Eight, p. 29.

Assimilating Video

75

sciously incorporating markers of artifice and construction into a given films design, filmmakers could use the cruder sound techniques of Super 8 to suggest a resistance to professional production standards, a connotation also welcomed by filmmakers who were using PixelVision camcorders in the 1990s. If a collectively shared feature of small-gauge filmmaking can be identified, it is to be found not in a Super 8 aesthetic, which suggests the idea of one dominant audiovisual style, but in a guiding impulse to recuperate the formats technical limitations. The reduced dimensions of every element of Super 8 filmmaking, from camera to splicer to screen, were taken to be loaded with special meanings, in the manner of Starks extolment of 8mm; thus, when filmmaker Lewis Klahr reflects back on his years of Super 8 filmmaking, which yielded approximately sixty films between 1977 and 1993, his references to intimacy and domesticity have less to do with representational content than with production materials, image quality, and contexts of use. The attributes he assigns to Super 8 were primary topics of discussion within the literature on video art during those years, and he makes the connection with video more explicitly when he observes, By necessity my aesthetic became TV-likemy work was best watched in a small room with a ten foot throw.19 Various filmmakers acknowledged similar crossmedia affinities, especially after realizing that expertly mastered transfers from Super 8 to analogue video were capable of preserving key aesthetic properties of their films; a few, such as Al Razutis in the 1970s and Clive Holden in the 1990s, exploited such connections in order to make hybrid film/video work the basis of their practice.20 As part of the process of evaluating video as a practical option, filmmakers assessed their materials in terms of trade-offs, as well as the aesthetic constraints imposed by necessity. Historically, the experimental filmmakers dependence on a largely indifferent movie industry has certainly generated periodic bouts of anxiety about the future of film itself and uncertainty as to the direction to take, as Arthur and Corinne Cantrill articulated the problem during another period of perceived crisis, the phasing out of 16mm color-reversal stock.21 But with each compulsory or elective transitionfrom reversal to negative film, 16mm to 8mm, regular 8 to Super 8, Super 8 to Hi8 video, Hi8 to miniDV, and so onfilmmakers have reassessed their attachment to a given format and considered the various ideological and aesthet ic object ions to what is somet imes labeled medium
19. Lewis Klahr, quoted in Cameron, Pieces of Eight, p. 75. 20. Of course, some filmmakers also insisted that Super 8 was superior to video and that the screening of Super 8 video transfers on a television screen was a menace. See the quotations from Katerina Thomadaki and Maria Klonaris, Call for the Defence of Super 8, in Cantrill, FilmThe Medium About to Be Lost, p. 5. 21. Cantrill, FilmThe Medium About to Be Lost, p. 4. A valuable account of the changes that accompanied the shift from reversal to negative film, as well as the complexities of making film translations and cross-media transfers, can be found in Janis Crystal Lipzin, Why Didnt I Work in Granite?, in Radical Light, pp. 26163.

76

OCTOBER

fetishism. A willingness to consider how Super 8 might overlap with video, practically, conceptually, and aesthetically, allowed experimental filmmakers to see, to a greater degree than they had in the 1960s and early 1970s, where the gains and losses in such transitions might be situated. Occasionally defining themselves against video artists who show little or no concept of cinema history, experimental filmmakers tend to endorse the idea that each medium deserves to be kept alive for aesthetic reasons but also given its embeddedness within a singular complex of cultural histories.22 In moments of transition, however, it also becomes apparent that filmmakers have searched for conceptual and aesthetic points of connection between moving-image media partly in order to develop a practice malleable enough to prevail in the face of obstacles such as the diminished availability of a set of industrially produced mater ials or technologies. This search can yield met aphor s, analogies, and associational meanings, as when the compact cameras of both Super 8 and consumer-grade video, machines small enough to be used often in everyday life, are seen as altering the look of the pro-filmic world in a manner analogous to distillations and distortions of memory. More generally, the attempt to see where and how sensibilities, practices, and aesthetic properties might reappear elsewhere has resulted in a more widespread consideration of the ways in which aspects of different mov ing-image media can be cont ained wit hin one medium. 23 This development is part of experimental cinemas long history of forging cross-arts or intermedia relationships, but it is also distinguished from past pursuits by one key motivating factor, the recognition that industrially mandated changes and cycles of technological obsolescence have necessitated an awareness of the strengths and limitations of a broad range of moving-image formats.24 * In a taped interview conducted by fellow filmmaker Willie Varela in 1980, Paul Sharits discusses his extensive use of Super 8 and asserts that there is no reason why Super 8 cant be as good as wider-gauge formats, although he hates
22. Scott Stark, Rendering Outside the Frame: Film Performance and Installation Art, in Radical Light, p. 241. 23. For a film theorists version of the notion that one medium can contain several media, see the discussion of nested media in Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010), pp. 19, 29091. 24. In the case of digital video, one of those perceived strengths is its capacity to provide filmic qualities (in any display size) and/or properties that seem specific to video. Thus, as it maintains its appeal for those who seek a unique video medium (see, for instance, the increased use of digital SLR still/video cameras such as the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, whose moving images are reputed to possess qualities not found in digital camcorders or film cameras), contemporary high-definition digital is also flexible enough to simulate filmic imagery convincingly. An awareness of the latter capacity for simulation has led filmmakers such as Matthew McCormick (Future So Bright, 2010) to shoot in 16mm and screen finished work in HD transfers (via digital projection, whenever possible).

Assimilating Video

77

Ernie Gehr. Crystal Palace. 2002.

editing in 8.25 Concerned to see greater institutional support for Super 8, Sharits even voices his belief that the Reagan administration, in honor of [the presidents] film career, should fund the upgrade of Super 8 projectors in schools across the country. Despite his appreciation for small-gauge cinema, however, he admits to Varela that he has no money and cannot afford to continue making photochemical films. Nevertheless, Sharits attempts to strike what he considers an optimistic note by raising the topic of the imminent death of not only film but also video. He informs Varela that, within three years, computer-based systems will allow users to image anything, with no discs, no nothing. Digital, just a program . . . High resolution, total control. This is the sea change Sharits claims to be waiting for, and he declares with confidence, Some day, film and video will be pass, man. But not imaging systems.26 Since Varela still regards Super 8 as his format of choice and video as an inferior alternative, he replies that Sharitss prognostication sounds terrible, because digital imaging is not the same as going out in the world and shooting something. But Sharits sees the possibility of continuity in his own digital future: the
25. Willie Varela and Paul Sharits, Paul Sharits Conversation 12/30/80, Box 9 Folder 4, Willie Varela Papers, M0785, Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. 26. Even though Sharits discusses Stan Brakhage during this interview, he does not mention that his own views on digital imaging are prefigured in the Camera Eye section of Brakhages Metaphors on Vision (1963), which ends with a discussion of the replacement of the almost obsolete film camera with the IBM and other electronic machines now capable of inventing imagery from scratch. Stan Brakhage, Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Film-Making, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, N.Y.: Documentext/McPherson, 2001), pp. 2122.

78

OCTOBER

Gehr. Crystal Palace. 2002.

filmmaker known for scratching and burning filmstrips predicts that he will search for flaws in the system and make an art out of flaws. Sharits did not live to see the changes to which he had mistakenly assigned such an early date of arrival, but other filmmakers have, and they continue to benefit from the spike in production and creativity he had been anticipating. One remarkable example of a multiplicative increase in output can be found in the filmography of Ernie Gehr. Between 1968 and 1996, Gehr made twenty films; between 2001 and 2011, he has produced over fifty single-channel videos and eight video installations. Even though Gehr would probably not describe his digital work as a search for flaws in the digital system, he has produced one video, titled Crystal Palace (2002), that not only suggests a direction Sharits might have taken but, more important, reflects a broader trend toward the incorporation into video of concerns and pursuits first explored and undertaken with photochemical film. The footage that serves as the basis of Crystal Palace was recorded onto miniDV tape with a digital video camera, a Sony model TRV900, in February 2000, during the early stages of a snowstorm in Lake Tahoe. The completed video begins with a tranquil, minute-long image of trees surrounded by white snow, complemented by the sound of a thin stream of water. This carefully composed shot is followed by a series of traveling shots taken from an unseen moving vehicle. During the first five minutes of moving shots, rows of trees occupy much of the frame in close-up, with more trees visible fleetingly in the background. In contrast to the lyricism of the

Assimilating Video

79

opening, a digitally edited soundtrack accentuates dissonant noises created by automobile, wind, and other ambient elements. The interplay of foreground and background forms generates different visual effects, as the more proximate trees seem to move more quickly from left to right than the background scene. Contributing to this interplay of depth planes is the all-pervasive snow, which creates the impression that the images have been shot in black-and-white or converted in postproduction into a grayscale palette (later, midway through the video, the appearance of a conspicuously red barn will reveal the natural source of this desaturation effect). Approximately six minutes into the video, longer views of the scenery begin to emerge, and the curving road creates an unpredictable array of variable distances between camera and pro-filmic scene. One effect generated by the turning movements of the vehicle is the intensification of the volumetric presence of the trees, but the heightened sense of physicality is also consistently offset by a visual flattening effect created by the snow. Based on my highly selective description of Crystal Palace , one could assume it to be a traditional landscape film that happens to have been shot, edited, and projected in digital video. In focusing on the imagery seen at a standard frame rate, however, I have omitted an integral aspect of the video, its digital flicker effect. Soon after the videos traveling shots have begun, Gehr periodically interrupts the forward movement of the work with a hybrid freeze frame that presents two frame fields, apparently flashing back and forth in rapid alternation. Video editors would likely recognize the image as an in between frame composed of two video fields, a transitional mesh of scan lines easily accessed with digital editing programs. Strikingly, Gehr stops the video in order to generate a locational flicker effect within different regions of the freezeframe composition, in the areas where the darker portion of one image field (usually showing tree branches) seems to be superimposed over white imagery in the other image field (typically displaying snow).27 In some of these hybrid images, flickering shapes seem to be rising out of a single plane, such as the middle ground of the scene, while foreground and background appear to remain still. Accompanying these moments, which appear throughout the twenty-eight-minute video, are a range of stuttering or tapping sounds, a sort of percussive correlative to the hybrid picture that draws upon the modified ambient soundtrack and contr ibutes to the mechanical qualit ies of the visual montage. In Gehrs view, the imposing images and sounds of those sequences should provide a strong counterpoint to more idyllic aspects of the scene he depicts with the camera.28 Flicker effects have been a familiar aesthetic convention within experimental film for nearly half a century, but Crystal Palace is distinguished by its
27. My use of the term locational is not intended to evoke Sharitss locational film installations; it refers to the type of interlaced digital flicker that appears only in localized areas of the image. 28. Ernie Gehr, interview with the author, New York City, May 1, 2011.

80

OCTOBER

exploitation of a method of displaying moving images that is specific to interlaced digital video. Engineers consider the effect a visual distortion or error, an example of digital artifacting that is created by flaws in the image-scanning patterns unique to interlaced video, a format now displaced by the progressive method of line scanning. In Gehrs hands, the locational flicker produced by this form of artifacting is, in its sources and its visual design, a reflexive, medium-specific feature of video, while also functioning as one possible iteration of a cross-media optical effect. The locational flicker is also explored in the context of another practice with a long tradition in experimental film, the activit y of going out in the world and shoot ing something that Varela was concerned to lose; yet it returns to that tradition with an awareness of what Stark referred to as the complex and impersonal aspects of digital imaging. Just as lyricism and a mechanical detachment alternate within the video, the apparently seamless, automatic recording process of the camera is set against Gehrs disruptive montage techniques. According to Gehr, Crystal Palace represents a return to earlier pursuits that had been stymied by technical problems and the absence of sufficient funding. In the late 1960s, Gehr was thinking about the mechanical nature of the medium and how cinema is dependent upon machines that, quite often . . . seem on the verge of breaking down, as well as tinkering with an 8mm projector.29 After discovering (perhaps around the same time Sharits did) that if the shutter and the pull-down mechanism of the claw were off, the projector would generate an unsteady image, he rephotographed 8mm film onto 16mm at five frames per second in order to place emphasis on the frames jumping within the frame, in a continuation of his earlier investigation into the intervals between frames, first initiated in films such as Morning (1967) and Wait (1967). For Gehr, the clearest articulation of his interest in the mechanical and the intervallic is Serene Velocity (1970), but this was soon followed by later attempts at more elaborate montage experiments that were too expensive or impractical to execute or complete.30 The lightness of the digital camera, the precision of desktop video and sound-editing programs, and the relatively low cost of digital materials allowed Gehr to resume his exploration of greater play between frames in Crystal Palace.31 In addition, Gehrs video stands now as an
29. Scott MacDonald, Ernie Gehr, in A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), p. 368. 30. MacDonald, Ernie Gehr, p. 370. 31. Ernie Gehr, interview with the author. Both Crystal Palace and Cotton Candy (2001) share characteristics also found in the work of Ken Jacobs, such as the Rorschach visuals Gehr sees in the freezeframe moments of the former and the variable movement of the mutoscope images of human figures in the latter. Given that Gehrs early explorations of frame intervals and retarded movement received some technical assistance from Jacobs, who began to explore similar interests around the same time with his own Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son in 1969, it can be said that digital video has also deepened the connections between the work of these two filmmakers.

Assimilating Video

81

Gehr. Crystal Palace. 2002.

early entry in what has become a large and diverse assortment of work by filmmakers trained in photochemical film practices who have gone on to search for both continuity and novelty in the digital realm.32 Crystal Palace might be seen as a confirmation of Halters view that practitioners working in video look both forward and back in time for inspiration, but it is also part of a shift into digital that was motivated largely by Gehrs financial situat ion, rather than any convict ions akin to the belief that for film, the experiment is over. Yet financial and technological impediments have also affected the ongoing life of the work. A casualty of the video industrys continual upgrading of its projection technology, Crystal Palace loses its flicker in the omnipresent progressive-scan displays that automatically de-interlace its hybrid freeze frames. The work can still be seen on older video monitors and projectors that do not correct the deliberately misaligned fields of its digital flicker effect, but the cost of maintaining and transporting such machines is prohibitive for Gehr. In addition, despite having produced installations in both miniDV and
32. Montage is signally important for such work, even if only as a practice to be rejected. For filmmakers such as Stark, Ken Jacobs, and Fred Worden, the increased control afforded by digital methods has facilitated an intensified exploration into the possibilities of digital editing. Others have responded to a perceived predominance of complex montage structures in the digital era by working with readymade images and emphasizing process. Examples of the latter include Lynn Marie Kirbys Latent Light Excavations series (200307) and Rebecca Barons ongoing Lossless series (begun in 2008).

82

OCTOBER

Gehr. Crystal Palace. 2002.

high-definition video, Gehr is reluctant to convert Crystal Palace into a gallerybased video attached to specific technologies of display. Gehrs wariness is a revealing indicator of the extent to which the theatrical v iewing situat ion has ret ained it s place among t he core v alues of experimental-film culture. Many experimental filmmakers have created work for the art gallery, and they have even allowed films initially intended for theatrical exhibition to be screened as loops in galleries. Yet within experimental film, the ongoing gallery screening remains unassimilable as a dominant mode of presentation and reception.33 In 2006, Paul Arthur traced experimental films lasting commitment to theatrical screening back to the formative postwar period, when the institutional stabilization of the American avant-garde ran parallel to the work of experimentalists who [who] installed their own highly original forms of subcultural community: workshops, co-ops, screening venues, funding and exhibition affiliations. Consequently, part of the meaning of the avant-gardeany given film as well as the movement as a whole resides in where and how it is consumed by actual viewers. There are no comparable site-specific dynamics, including IMAX, relevant to commercial moviegoing.34
33. A group of contemporary filmmakers, curators, and programmers discuss these issues in Projecting Questions? Mike Hoolbooms Invisible Man Between the Art Gallery and the Movie Theatre, ed. Michael Maranda (Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 2009). 34. Paul Arthur, Unseen No More? The Avant-Garde on DVD, Cineaste 32, no. 1 (Winter 2006), p. 7.

Assimilating Video

83

Arthur observed that this ethos of unique presentation had been reinforced by expanded-cinema events instead of being undermined by domestic viewing options, and five years later, it seems that, despite the difficulties still being faced by distributors such as Canyon Cinema, the public screening remains the primary venue for contemporary experimental filmmakers.35 If Gehr succeeds in his search for technicians who can remediate Crystal Palace into high-definition video, audiences will be asked once again to commit to seeing the work in a cinema or a space sufficiently similar to one, and they will likely submit to a spectatorial experience with a predetermined start time and a fixed duration. * Some observers have advanced the notion that, in the digital era, we no longer see what we think of as avant-garde film in the same places or the same ways as we did, but if this were the case, then established experimental-film festivals and venues would be undergoing drastic transformations.36 Various problems and challenges clearly persist, especially in the economies of film printing, distribution, and preservation, but I see no evidence of identity-altering shocks to the system. Smaller-scale changes abound, however, in every aspect of experimental film practice. The question of where and to what degree digital technologies have played a part in shaping the contemporary scene remains an open one, in part because the assimilation of video into that culture remains a fairly recent development and in part because there are so many other factors to consider when taking stock of the present situation. Yet it seems probable that death-of-film rhetoric will continue to be employed as a framework for analyzing and interpreting the digital turn. My remarks here are offered as an alternative view of continuity and change, one that emphasizes the adaptive strategies and processes of negotiation that filmmakers continue to implement with consistency, even as the tradition of declaring the end of experimental-film practice as we know it lives on.

35. Mike Hoolboom offers an appreciation of both the cinematic viewing situation and later domestic re-viewings in his essay Notes on Attention, Projection, Foreplay and the Second Encounter (2010), http://www.mikehoolboom.com/r2/section_item.php?artist=315 (accessed March 1, 2011). Hoolbooms position would likely have been shared, at least in part, by Stan Brakhage, who expressed a wish that digital video could become an approximate of film, a very close approximate, but be cheap, so people can have it in their homes. Ed Halter, True Independents: Brakhage and Dorsky Hash Out the Realities of Poetic Cinema, indieWIRE (April 30, 2001), http://www.indiewire.com/article/interview_true_independents_brakhage_and_dorsky_hash_out_the_realities_of_p/ (accessed May 1, 2011). Brakhage had articulated similar ideas about screenings in the home in his statements on 8mm film. See his In Defence of Amateur (1971), in Essential Brakhage, p. 150. 36. James, Imposing Technologies, p. 104.

Phil Solomon. Psalm III: Night of the Meek. 2002.

Darkness on the Edge of Town: Film Meets Digital in Phil Solomons In Memoriam (Mark LaPore)*

JOHN P. POWERS
In 2005, Phil Solomon collaborated with his best friend, the highly respected filmmaker Mark LaPore, on a short digital video entitled Crossroad, which they made as a get-well offering for a mutual friend.1 When LaPore passed away unexpectedly several weeks later, Solomon drew from the same source material to produce a trilogy dedicated to his memory: Rehearsals for Retirement (2007), Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007), and Still Raining, Still Dreaming (200809). This series of films, titled In Memoriam (Mark LaPore) , represents a dramatic shift for Solomon, in that all of the images are derived from various installments of the popular video-game franchise Grand Theft Auto, which marks his departure from celluloid-based to digital filmmaking. This shift is especially surprising considering that Solomons previous workincluding The Secret Garden (1988), Remains to Be Seen (198994), and the Twilight Psalm series (19992002)is heavily invested in the material basis of Super 8mm and 16mm film. These films are literally handmade, as Solomon alters the chemical properties of the films emulsion and reprints his images frame-byframe on an optical printer. Moreover, Solomon is still closely associated with a group of post-Structural filmmakers identified by Tom Gunning as forging a minor cinema. According to Gunning, this generation, which also includes LaPore, Lewis Klahr, Peggy Ahwesh, Peter Herwitz, and Nina Fonoroff, rejected Structural film to return to the emphasis on rhythm, montage, and the flow of images associated with Stan Brakhage, albeit with more modest ambitions and a faith in the image rather than the self.2 On the surface, this makes Solomon an unlikely candidate to embrace digital filmmaking so wholeheartedly. Solomons shift to digital has important ramifications for the avant-garde as a whole. Specifically, In Memoriam draws upon a set of representational strategies
* I would like to thank J. J. Murphy and the editors of October for their helpful suggestions in revising this article. 1. This friend is filmmaker David Gatten. When Crossroad premiered at the New York Film Festivals Views from the Avant-Garde in September 2005, it was called Untitled (for David Gatten) and is sometimes still referred to by that name. 2. Tom Gunning, Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Klahr, LaPore and Solomon, Motion Picture 3, nos. 12 (19891990), pp. 25. OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 84106. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

86

OCTOBER

associated with the poetic avant-garde, a tradition still deeply rooted in 16mm filmmaking.3 It is the interplay between this traditions frequent emphasis on compositional rigorthe play of light and texture, polyvalent montage, and elliptical narrativeand the singular digital aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto that constitutes In Memoriams major contribution. As many of the avant-gardes most venerated filmmakers convert from film to digital, it is tempting to mark the occasion as both an ontological and an aesthetic rupture, with the concomitant assumption that the best digital work will be that which interrogates the specificities of its medium. Solomons films, however, complicate this assumption by introducing a set of representational techniques with expressly filmic connotations into the digital realm, which forces him to engage directly with the contingencies and possibilities of both media. Therefore, Solomon provides an instructive case study of how avant-garde filmmakers extend and reinvent their practice as they move from film to digital. In discussing In Memoriam, commentators have tended to argue that the series represents a breakthrough because it calls attention to the coldness, emptiness, and, most importantly, immateriality at the heart of digital video through an implicit comparison with cinema. Just as Solomon mourns the loss of LaPore, these videos mourn the loss of film as a material substance, the replacement of chemistry with code.4 Despite the attempts of Grand Theft Auto (hereafter GTA) to mimic the corporeality of the physical world, Solomons ethereal digital landscapes do not really exist, thus forcing the viewer to confront the gap between presence and absence. This disconnect between a material world that compels belief by virtue of its indexicality and a theoretical world that attempts to approximate it by way of an intangible abstract code is thought to be the defining feature of digital video, its essence, and so Solomons films effectively make a mediumspecific argument. Gregg Biermann and Sarah Markgraf, for example, note that these images are absent, unreachable, and indeterminatefor they exist in the invisible electronic workings of a machine and in the split-second choices made by a user, no two game sessions the same.5 Michael Sicinski asks, How could one look at these images and see anything but loss, the very absence of the phenomenal world and its variegated textures?6 This reading is essentially derived by extrapolating from Solomons stylistic choices and thematic preoccupations. Solomon states that the films are elegies,
3. The poetic avant-garde is not an uncontested term. My intention is not to argue for a redefinition of avant-garde aesthetics but rather to adopt a critical shorthand that calls to mind strategies associated with the film poem, trance film, and lyrical film. Generally speaking, these are films that foreground subjectivity, psychology, lyricism, and evocative imagery in a manner distinct from the Structural film or collage film. In adopting this term, I follow James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 2960. 4. Michael Sicinski, Phil Solomon Visits San Andreas and Escapes, Not Unscathed, Cinema Scope 30 (Spring 2007), p. 32. 5. Gregg Biermann and Sarah Markgraf, Found Footage, On Location: Phil Solomons Last Days in a Lonely Place, Millennium Film Journal 52 (Winter 2009), p. 32. 6. Sicinski, Phil Solomon Visits San Andreas and Escapes, Not Unscathed, p. 31.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

87

which certainly seems an apt descriptor for works so imbued with ruminative, atmospheric melancholy.7 Because Crossroad was conceived spontaneously on what turned out to be the last night that the two friends would spend together, Solomon felt compelled to return to GTA to search for answers in the wake of LaPores death.8 The narrative of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA: SA), the installment from which the first three films are derived, involves a protagonist, CJ, who returns to the state of San Andreas (modeled on California) to avenge his mothers killer.9 Therefore, the game itself could be described as a narrative of mourning. Through associational logic, Solomon transfigures CJs loss into personal anguish by using the game as a vehicle to work through his grief over losing LaPore. Solomon explains that CJs back story became more relevant after LaPores death, inspiring him to revisit the game: I was . . . searching for clues and poetic signposts; in effect, I was looking for Mark. He further notes that this drive extended to the representation of the character, as CJ even came to resemble LaPore in physical appearance.10 Consequently, In Memoriam s overriding tone is one of sadness or loss. Sicinski calls the films chilly and geometricshadows of life at multiple, unbridgeable removes, while Biermann and Markgraf describe them as ghostly tableaux that trace the edges of stories long gone, dreaded, or never to be.11 Solomons images prove worthy of such descriptions. A solitary figure roams through oneiric landscapes while rain pours from the sky. A hearse burns inside an abandoned railroad tunnel. Half-obscured in shadow, unworn clothes hang from a rack in an empty closet. Because LaPore died on September 11, exactly four years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Solomon includes a number of references to the apocalypse. In Memoriams landscapes are often filled with airplanes, some of which explode or drop from the sky. Last Days, the film most consumed with apocalyptic destruction, incorporates dialogue from Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which explicitly addresses the end of the world as the camera descends into a dark, murky sea. Through these references, the films seem to suggest that LaPores death and the end of time are somehow related, even if this association is invoked largely through inference. Solomons ability to force the game into such a dark, foreboding register makes it appealing to impute In Memoriams stylistic and thematic emphasis on loss to the very nature of digital media itself. While many avant-garde filmmakers, including Ahwesh, Jeanne Liotta, and Michael Robinson, have also made machin7. Sue Zemka, An Interview with Phil Solomon, English Language Notes 46, no.1 (Spring/Summer 2008), p. 202. 8. Ibid. 9. While there have been many installments released in the series since 1997, In Memoriam is derived entirely from the fifth and sixth major iterations, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto IV. GTA: San Andreas was released for the PlayStation 2 video-game console in 2004 by Rockstar Games. 10. Zemka, An Interview with Phil Solomon, p. 202. 11. Sicinski, Phil Solomon Visits San Andreas and Escapes, Not Unscathed, p. 31; Biermann and Markgraf, Found Footage, On Location: Phil Solomons Last Days in a Lonely Place, p. 32.

88

OCTOBER

ima, the user-driven manipulation of video-game engines to create films, one could argue that Solomon is unique in forging a connection between digital aesthetics and cinematic ontology.12 Such a position, however, overlooks In Memoriams reliance on a set of representational strategies developed by the poetic avant-garde tradition rooted in celluloid film. Specifically, Solomons innovation is to amplify the evocative melancholy at the core of the game using poetic techniques in the realms of composition, mise-en-scne, and editing. It is the juxtaposition of cinematic and digital aesthetics that makes these films so arresting. The first of these aesthetic strategies is an emphasis on compositional rigor that is somewhat new for Solomon. In many of his previous films, chemical alteration of the emulsion is sometimes so pervasive that discerning an individual shots overall composition becomes quite difficult. In Psalm III: Night of the Meek (2002), for instance, chemical treatment buries the images in a thick, swirling paste. The viewer can make out certain figures, such as a girl playing Ring Around the Rosie, but detecting a set of overriding compositional principles is challenging. In Memoriam, however, proceeds by a series of carefully rendered images, some static and others elaborately mobile. A four-shot sequence from Still Raining, Still Dreaming serves to illustrate In Memoriams compositional logic. In the first, the Brooklyn Bridge at night is pictured from an extremely low angle by the equivalent of a static camera.13 A lightly swaying bush that hovers in the upper left of the frame offsets the strong diagonal provided by the tracks. This is followed by another static shot of a house at night, which is perfectly centered in the frame as an airplane glides slowly overhead. The third shot is of an empty factory with paper strewn about the floor, while the fourth features a slow, steady pan across a cramped closet. The camera passes over a woman huddled on a bed with her back to us, her clothes hung on a rack, and finally pauses to observe the shadows that flicker over the murky wallpaper. Such meticulous compositions have even led a few commentators to suggest that the films exhibit a tableau aesthetic, although there is quite a bit more shot variety as well as camera movementthan this description suggests.14 This careful attention to composition has been important to many avantgarde filmmakers. Because the avant-garde places such a heavy premium on visual novelty, filmmakers associated with many different schools and movements have attempted to compose images that are memorable, beautiful, or strange; in fact, some avant-garde films, such as Michael Snows Wavelength (1967), build their compositional strategies into the very concepts of the films
12. For general background on machinima, see Henry Lowood, High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima, in Videogames and Art , ed. Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 5979. 13. Although it is technically imprecise, I use conventional cinematic vocabulary to describe these films. Hence, I will occasionally refer to a camera despite the fact that there is obviously no physical camera recording the shots. 14. Biermann and Markgraf, Found Footage, On Location: Phil Solomons Last Days in a Lonely Place,p. 32.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

89

Solomon. Still Raining, Still Dreaming. 2009.

themselves. Moreover, filmmakers have adopted a number of approaches to the problem of composing for the camera. In films such as The Glass System (2000) and Kolkata (2005), Mark LaPore favors static compositions that are held for extended periods, forcing the viewer to pay close attention to minor variations over a lengthy span of time. Compositions preferred by Brakhage and Nathaniel Dorsky often defamiliarize their subjects, encouraging the viewer to contemplate light, texture, and the relationships between images, thereby fostering a sense of exquisite delicacy. What makes In Memoriam different is the fact that there is neither an actual camera nor a physical place being photographed. Because Solomon works with imagery generated by a game engine, securing a desired composition presents its own set of challenges. Most notably, composing for GTA forces Solomon to invent clever solutions to problems stemming from quirks in the games design. For instance, in order to produce a shot that does not foreground CJs presence, Solomon must commandeer a vehicle, which forces the game to adopt CJs point of view. Thus, almost every shot in Last Days and Still Raining is taken from a car, motorcycle, golf cart, hovercraft, or bulldozer, despite the fact that none of these vehicles is ever visible. The challenge for Solomon is to figure out how to manipulate the game into letting him drive specific vehicles into restricted locations to obtain a desired composition.15 To capture time-lapse imagery of rays of
15. Solomon alludes to the importance of this technique when he jokes that he should be nominated for Best Driver in an Animated Short Subject. Zemka, An Interview with Phil Solomon, p. 205.

90

OCTOBER

shifting sunlight piercing through the window of an abandoned factory in Still Raining, Solomon had to find a way to drive a motorcycle into the space without falling through holes in the floor.16 Therefore, composing arresting shots often entailed devising ingenious ways to circumvent the games built-in limitations and challenges. If static shots must be taken from parked vehicles, it follows that tracking shots are the result of vehicles in motion. In order to execute steady camera movements, Solomon must demonstrate a great deal of precision in his ability to maneuver with the game controller, as evidenced by the meticulous track in on Los Angeless Griffith Park Observatory in the first shot of Last Days or the slow track out of a dark forest that opens Rehearsals. Furthermore, the choice of vehicle can yield different results. By commandeering a helicopter or flying car, Solomon simulates crane shots of impressive scale, a rarity in avant-garde film production. As these examples suggest, composition in In Memoriam is closely linked with a keen interest in landscape and place, both aesthetically and semiologically. A central achievement of the series is its integration of the landscape tradition of avant-garde filmmaking into digital environments. In The Garden in the Machine, Scott MacDonald observes that avant-garde filmmakers have devised a variety of novel strategies to represent a sense of place in the cinema, whether urban or rural. In particular, MacDonald focuses on the representation of
16. Phil Solomon, e-mail message to author, August 16, 2010.

Solomon. Still Raining, Still Dreaming. 2009.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

91

Phil Solomon and Mark LaPore. Crossroad. 2005.

nature and landscape, arguing that the avant-gardes insistence on the primacy of place is both distinctive and radical. Moreover, MacDonald conceives this trend broadly, tracing it through films about the wilderness, the American West, urban spaces, and the dichotomy between city and country, drawing explicit links between avant-garde filmmaking and nineteenth-century painting.17 In Memoriam fits squarely into this tradition, as Solomons compositions often invoke landscape artists ranging from painter Caspar David Friedrich to filmmaker Peter Hutton. The central image in Crossroad, for example, is CJ, clad only in jeans and a white undershirt, staring into the distance with his back toward us, recalling Friedrichs famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). Friedrichs wanderer stands on a precarious rock formation and gazes out at a tumultuous landscape enshrouded in the eponymous thick fog. Similarly, CJ is caught in the middle of a torrential downpour, with menacing black clouds moving ominously through the sky and gusts of rain whipping past him. In both cases, the viewer is presented with a highly expressive, contemplative depiction of the relation between nature and the body. Or, consider a shot of a dense forest in Last Days. The foreground is dominated by two large branches that protrude from the top of the frame and sway gently in the rain, while a wooden fence and the headlights of a solitary car
17. Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

92

OCTOBER

Solomon. Last Days in a Lonely Place. 2007.

are visible on the horizon. While these objects are clearly recognizable, the hazy, black-and-white, heavy rainfall, the shifting patterns of light (generated primarily from lightning), and the dense texturing of the trees render them murky and mysterious. Compare this to Peter Huttons In Titans Goblet (1991), itself an homage to Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole. In Huttons film, a thick mist, later revealed to be smoke from a heap of burning tires, punctuates stunning blackand-white images of dawn breaking over the Catskill Mountains. In this landscape film, a ghostly poeticism infuses the phenomenal world such that it becomes at once familiar and strange. Capturing footage from such a diverse array of locales forces Solomon to engage with GTA: SAs especially vast geography, which offers a surprising number of digital environments.18 Although Crossroad and Rehearsals are generally more rural and Last Days and Still Raining predominantly urban, most of the films fea18. GTA: SA proved especially innovative in terms of game design. Central to its success are the related notions of immersion and game play. In terms of the former, the game boasts a massive number of backdrops for CJ to explore. The state of San Andreas consists of three major cities: Los Santos, Las Venturas, and San Fiero (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, respectively), plus the rural regions that connect them. Each city is composed of sharply defined neighborhoods, which pose their own unique challenges for the player. Moreover, the gamer is responsible for performing not only the missions but also routine daily tasks such as eating and sleeping. Depending upon how he or she fulfills these basic functions, the game responds in kind; if CJ eats only fastfood cheeseburgers, the character begins to gain weight, making it more difficult to participate in high-speed chases. The game also offers a great number of possibilities for play as defined less by formal structure than by testing the limits and boundaries of the game itself thanks to the wide range of game experiences that a player can choose from. GTA: SA is exceptional in this regard and is often cited as the landmark sandbox-style game. Although the narrative centers around the missions that CJ must undertake, he is not obligated to complete them. The state of San Andreas is so large that a player can opt to neglect the games narrative and explore its open-endedness with relative freedom.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

93

Solomon. Last Days in a Lonely Place. 2007.

ture a variety of evocative settings, including forests, tunnels, lakes, oceans, mountains, theaters, hotels, apartments, convenience stores, and cemeteries. In Last Days, Solomon even includes a few famous locations, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Griffith Park Observatory. These landscapes and buildings are sometimes populated by solitary individuals, but more often are utterly abandoned. By bringing to bear the strategies of landscape filmmaking on the cold artificiality of GTA: SAs digital world, Solomon elicits a pervasive sense of uncanniness, as though the landscape were mysteriously unsettled. Solomons use of carefully composed images is decidedly cinematic. Video games are coordinate-based spatial arrays, and because they are continually advancing the sensation of perpetual motion, composition tends to be negligible. Solomon, however, imports compositional rigora storied tradition in the poetic strand of avant-garde filmmakinginto the world of video-game aesthetics and plays upon the odd compatibility of the two. He achieves a similar feat with the games mise-en-scne by adopting the avant-gardes long-standing interest in the sensual tactility of the image. In their analyses, Sicinski and Biermann and Markgraf are clearly responding to the delicate poignancy that Solomon brings to cold digital texture, using synthetic light and shadow to produce results that are genuinely surprising. This technique is closely linked to the poetic avant-garde, which has always been deeply engaged with the palpable quality of light inscribing an image into emulsion. By sensual tactility, I mean to invoke the poetic avant-gardes frequent emphasis on the surface structure of the image, its interest in atmospherics. In these films, techniques of composition and lighting serve to accentuate the formal allure of a landscape, object, or person. If a filmmaker can sustain images of this type for a certain period of time, as in Bruce Baillies Castro Street (1966), the film

94

OCTOBER

Solomon. Rehearsals for Retirement. 2007.

can convey a strong sense of mood or tone as the viewer becomes attuned to the exquisiteness of the material world. Indeed, James Peterson notes that poetic films are often organized according to large-scale patterns in tone.19 In Memoriams prevailing mood might be labeled contemplative, as the formal elegance and strong connotative dimension of Solomons images bring to the fore their sensual qualities, fostering in the receptive viewer a state of meditation or rapture.20 Early in Rehearsals for Retirement, we are presented with a thirty-four-second shot depicting parallel train tracks underneath an arching brick enclosure, suggesting a subterranean space or dark passageway. It is raining heavily, and the drops bounce off the walls and tracks. Some of the drops disappear, while others form exaggerated splashes on the ceiling, walls, and ground, which, of course, is not logically consistent with real-world rainfall. Meanwhile, sheets of mist emanate from deep inside the tunnel and proceed to march into the foreground. The quality of the mist, not to mention the regularity with which it comes forward, is highly peculiar. Strangely, it appears uniform, as though it had molded itself to the shape of the tunnel. Although it clearly is meant to register as mist, it also resembles sheets of light, producing a hologram-like effect. In the shots final
19. Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order, p. 51. 20. Atmospherics of this sort have been particularly important to avant-garde filmmakers, but they are also evident in the art cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and Terrence Malick, whose influence Solomon has acknowledged. In fact, Last Days in a Lonely Place contains ambient sound from Tarkovskys The Sacrifice (1986).

Darkness on the Edge of Town

95

three seconds, the camera unexpectedly tracks forward, taking us further into the tunnel before ending abruptly. In this shot, there is a strong sense of compositional austerity; until the final moments, the camera simply observes the archway from a fixed point. The shot also conveys geometric precision, as the distinctive arch of the tunnel is offset by the strong directionality of the tracks. The mist seems exceptionally delicate precisely because it appears pliant and otherworldly, almost like a hallucination. The extended duration gives the viewer time to scan the image and contemplate the ethereality of such an oddly tactile image. It should be noted that GTA: SA marked a maturation for the series in terms of graphic rendering and interactive play, with many video-game aficionados lauding the level of detail attained by the games designers.21 That said, Solomon heightens the attention to detail already present in shots like this one, which accounts for the strong sense of atmosphere. In video-game scholarship, aesthetics are frequently downplayed, but Solomon takes an interest in these games chiefly for their dreamy, haunted landscapes, which provide him with the tools to generate his own evocative images.22 An instructive point of comparison is filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, whose recent films consist primarily of poetic images of ordinary phenomena occurring in and around his immediate environmentnature and city life, clouds, display windows, clothes, signs, water, many varieties of florawhich take on a radiant lushness that fills the viewer with a sense of devotion, to borrow the filmmakers term.23 Through careful cinematography, Dorsky defamiliarizes these objects to attune the viewer to nuances in texture, patterns of light, and the delicacy of the phenomenal world. The editing emphasizes subtle but complicated connections between the images, which produces an overall tone of rapture or heightened sensitivity.24 In a certain sense, In Memoriam represents an attempt to inflect this aesthetic differently by using digital media to generate the images, which results in shots like those described above, seemingly of this world yet strangely removed. In the gaming world, the capacity to render environments with precise detail is usually situated within the context of realism, but this becomes complicated with regard to GTA. While the series has been responsible for drawing attention to improvements in graphic realism, the games are not visually realistic, at least not in the sense that they mimic how we are accustomed to seeing the world.25 For example, many of the games images are rendered with the spatial distortion and exaggerated depth associated with a wide-angle lens, whereas the flatness of characters against the
21. A good general overview of Grand Theft Auto is Nate Garrelts, An Introduction to Grand Theft Auto Studies, in The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays, ed. Nate Garrelts ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), pp. 115. 22. Zemka, An Interview with Phil Solomon, p. 202. 23. Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 2003). 24. See Nathaniel Dorsky, in A Critical Cinema 5, ed. Scott MacDonald (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 77110. 25. For a discussion of realism in Grand Theft Auto, see Laurie N. Taylor, From Stompin Mushrooms to Bustin Heads: Grand Theft Auto III as Paradigm Shift, in Garrelts, The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto, p. 118.

96

OCTOBER

background simultaneously suggests a telephoto lens. Colors tend to be slightly oversaturated. As has been mentioned, raindrops pop off the ground in a way that seems overstated, even aestheticized. The fact that San Andreas is represented as a composite of three famous cities immediately invokes Baudrillards notion of the simulacrum, a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, which could be extended to virtually every element of the game.26 Solomon states: What intrigued me the most was the strange poignancy I felt in the games polygonal aspirations, its desires to be of the real world that fell short in very interesting ways.27 In this passage, Solomon suggests that he intuited a poignancy in the game itself, but in his films, he develops this quality by drawing upon the poetic avantgardes emphasis on atmospherics to underline the artificiality of the games attempts at realism. Most straightforwardly, he uses the menu to adjust the games interior settings, altering color, brightness, and contrast levels. Rehearsals is marked by a pervasive aqua-blue haze and very deep blacks, not unlike Gottfried Hellnweins painting Untitled (After Caspar David Friedrich) (1998). This schema persists in both interior and exterior locations, uniting disparate spaces and thereby suggesting a self-contained world of quiet melancholy. The desaturated black-andwhite of Last Days surprisingly introduces a slight graininess, which strengthens its connection to the 16mm tradition. In Still Raining, soft focus results from purposefully tilting the camera up to the sky during a rainstorm to get the lens wet.28 Moreover, Solomon can modify the available light in the game itself by knocking out streetlamps and car headlights, which is akin to orchestrating key and fill lights on set. Thus, his concerns are similar to those of a traditional cine26. See, for instance, Jean Baudrillard, Simulations , trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 4. 27. Zemka, An Interview with Phil Solomon, p. 202. 28. Phil Solomon, e-mail message to author, August 17, 2010. Note that this is an allusion to LaPores film The Sleepers (1989).

Solomon. Last Days in a Lonely Place. 2007.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

97

matographer, but the choices are determined by menu settings and design contingencies instead of a light meter. In addition to establishing an overall tone or look, Solomon pushes the boundaries of the games mise-en-scne through the judicious use of cheat codes to extend the usual capabilities of regular game play. A cheat code is a series of buttons that the gamer inputs into his controller to introduce modifications that are not officially part of the game, although these effects are programmed by designers as challenges to users, who discover them and post the combinations online. Video-game scholar Cindy Poremba has classified cheat codes according to their functions. The most common cheats used in In Memoriam are those that she calls enhancements, minor modifications . . . to the game that may enrich the meta-story or experiential narrative.29 An enhancement is a cheat code that allows the player to access a novel but relatively inconsequential effect, increasing enjoyment of the game without fundamentally altering its structure. In Memoriams most conspicuous enhancements are the extensive use of time and weather cheats. Time cheats permit Solomon to change from day to night at will. More importantly, weather cheats are featured in virtually every shot in the series. In all four films, Solomon conjures rain, thunderstorms, and overcast skies, which are used in conjunction with different environments for specific effects. In Last Days, a light rain lends the forest setting a glistening sheen, while the intense thunderstorm in Rehearsals causes the ocean to respond violently, appearing menacing and dark. By contrast, the storm in Crossroad is accompanied by sudden bursts of lightning. Other enhancements include generating (or spawning, in the games parlance) a hearse and forcing planes to drop from the sky. Game designers deliberately program cheat codes into their games to
29. Cindy Poremba, Against Embedded Agency: Subversion and Emergence in GTA3, in Garrelts, The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto, p. 204.

Solomon. Rehearsals for Retirement. 2007.

98

OCTOBER

engage with their most ambitious fans. Some effects, however, are unintended. These glitches are programming errors that can be exploited by the gamer to induce effects that theoretically should be impossible. In In Memoriam, Solomon tends to use these glitches to juxtapose incongruous elements. Rehearsals contains a shot from inside a hearse as it moves slowly through a wheat field; bizarrely, the stalks of wheat appear inside the car, as though its boundaries are somehow permeable. Similarly, rain falls and fires burn inside an empty hotel lobby in Last Days. A bouquet of flowers that allows CJ to court romantic partners is used poetically in Crossroad and Rehearsals, inserted into incompatible spaces and left to float endlessly. These glitches are especially suited to Solomons aesthetic precisely because they are not overstated. In these shots, the mise-en-scne is thrown off-kilter by a single dissonant element, fostering an aura of poetic mystery, much like in Tarkovskys Mirror (1975) or The Sacrifice (1986). Solomons manipulation of the games mise-en-scne suggests the thorny connection between In Memoriam and found-footage films, which Biermann and Markgraf call to our attention with the title of their essay: Found Footage, On Location. Because Solomon charges images that are not his own with a poetic valence, he calls to mind poetic found-footage films such as Bruce Conners Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976) and Valse Triste (1977). If we take found footage to mean images that the filmmaker did not shoot, then this would be an accurate descriptor. There is a tendency, however, to assume that the ingenuity of the found-footage or collage film is in the editing or juxtaposition of elements. A filmmaker may rework found images on an optical printer, thereby transforming them, but it is questionable whether the level of manipulation is as generative or of the same type as that open to Solomon in In Memoriam. Although he must work within the parameters of the game, he can construct his own shots, arrange figures and objects within the composition, adjust light levels, orchestrate camera movements, and perform many of the same basic tasks as a cinematographer or director. Therefore, it is perhaps best to add an important qualification to the classification of In Memoriam as a found-footage work. Treatment of the image itself is not the only way that Solomon brings a poetic valence to his source material. This is also fostered by his editing strategy, which links images to each other via associational logic. More specifically, In Memoriam is cut according to the principles of polyvalent montage, which has been practiced by many significant filmmakers, including Brakhage, Dorsky, and Warren Sonbert. As formulated by Nol Carroll: In this mode of editing, it is particularly important that each shot is polyvalent in the sense that it can be combined with surrounding shots along potentially many dimensions. That is, this style begins in the realization that a shot may either match or contrast with adjacently preceding or succeeding shots in virtue of color, subject,

Darkness on the Edge of Town

99

shape, shade, texture, the screen orientation of objects, the direction of camera or object movement, or even the stasis thereof.30 Polyvalent montage builds on Sergei Eisensteins notion of overtonal montage, which brings together metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage, taking into account all of a shots elements. Conflict is generated by the tension between the primary and secondary stimuli within the frame, the dominant and the overtone, respectively.31 Therefore, polyvalent montage can be understood as a form of overtonal montage in which the dominant is always shifting, or, as Carroll puts it, overtonal montage in spades. 32 The logic for editing two shots together might be as simple as comparison or contrast, but more often, connections are varied and elusive. Most importantly, Carroll stipulates that polyvalent montage can be staggeringly complex because the rationale of the cutting is constantly shifting to new associative pathways.33 Two shots might be linked by a shared dominant, such as color, but a unique texture in the second shot might reappear or become dominant several shots later, creating a dense web of interconnections. Polyvalent montage is not new to Solomons filmmaking. In an interview, he claims that almost all of [his] work has been involved with trying to find new ways to place one image meaningfully next to another.34 In The Snowman (1995), texture, color, screen direction, and subject matter constitute four significant parameters that continuously trade off their roles as dominants and overtones. Certain shots, such as those featuring a snow shovel or a bathing suit, are clearly linked by the prominence of the color red. As comparisons are drawn between a boy playing in the snow and a boy splashing in a swimming pool with his mother, the viewers eye is drawn to similarities and differences of screen direction. The emulsion decay results in nearly opaque scratching over each image, but eventually this dominant fades into the background, as the imagery becomes legible enough to draw parallels in subject matter. In In Memoriam, polyvalent montage operates at both local and global levels. Locally, clusters of shots frequently prime the viewer to search for continuities and discontinuities. For example, early in Still Raining, we see a series of static shots of houses and storefronts, all of which are slowly overtaken by moving shadows, presumably from Solomon blocking the sun with offscreen vehicles. Of course, all are united by subject matter, but a number of other parameters alternate as dominants. For instance, consecutive shots will sometimes feature shadows that move in the same direction (usually left to right or bottom to top), but others will cede directionality of shadow to color. In a nod to LaPore and Dorsky, storefront signage
30. Nol Carroll, Causation, the Ampliation of Movement and Avant-Garde Film, in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 177. 31. Sergei Eisenstein, Word and Image, in The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1942), p. 79. 32. Carroll, Causation, the Ampliation of Movement and Avant-Garde Film, in Theorizing the Moving Image, p. 178. 33. Ibid. 34. Phil Solomon, in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5, p. 209.

100

OCTOBER

Solomon. The Snowman. 1995.

forms new associations, whether it be color (red, green) or Chinese lettering. The first shot in the series is of a house at night, but just before the cut, a light appears in the window, anticipating the next shot of a storefront during the day. At the global level, polyvalent montage is extended across entire films. Rehearsals revolves around a set of visual motifs that reappear in different combinations, calling out to each other without making their connections overly explicit. Some of these recurring images include low-level tracking shots through wooded areas, low-angle shots of CJ with blacked-out features, crane shots over land and water, fires burning, hearses, planes falling from the sky, and train tracks inside a tunnel. Solomon then permutes and multiplies these images, with the logic for their placement continuously shifting. A long section in the middle, for example, is built around tracking shots, as the camera lurches through fields, streets, and skies. This dominant is soon displaced by others, such as a darkened CJ facing the camera and the recurrence of fiery orange accents, but it later resurfaces, contributing to the films weblike editing schema. The major advantage to polyvalent montage is that it transforms editing

Darkness on the Edge of Town

101

Solomon. Still Raining, Still Dreaming. 2009.

from a functional operation into an expressive one. Solomon alludes to this when he describes edits as emotional weather.35 In most films, editing is a means of communicating information to the viewer, capturing the most relevant gestures or facial expressions in order to advance a narrative. Polyvalent montage, on the other hand, privileges the sensual qualities of the image, which heightens the viewers attention to texture, patterning, and form. Because filmmakers are often wary of making connections too obvious or literal, the result is often a strong sense of ambiguity. In the case of In Memoriam, it can be difficult to articulate why one image follows another, but we nonetheless feel that it makes intuitive sense. In this way, editing becomes an emotional instead of intellectual pursuit; we feel the density of the connections before we can rationalize or explain them. Because films employing polyvalent montage connect their images on the basis of formal characteristics instead of storytelling logic, most tend to be nonnarrative. In Memoriam, however, blurs the distinction between narrative and non-narrative to the degree that it qualifies as an elliptical narrative. In narratives of this type, images seem to point to an ongoing story, but the particularities are fuzzy or in some cases entirely unclear. The viewer may have difficulty accounting for all of the pieces but nonetheless intuits a strong organizing logic or sense of a narrative trajectory. This allows the filmmaker to retain the semblance of narrative while also subverting it to the associational flow of images. Avant-garde filmmakers have always flirted with, subverted, or engaged with
35. Ibid.

102

OCTOBER

narrative, but Tom Gunning argues that it is a defining feature of the minor cinema filmmakers, who returned to narrative after its rejection by Structural filmmakers in the 1970s, albeit in a highly fragmented manner.36 These filmmakers seemed to be fascinated by the possibility of narrative but tended to efface many of the conventions associated with it, such as goal-driven protagonists, psychological motivation, and clearly motivated causality. Take, for instance, Solomons detailed explanation of his film Clepsydra (1992), the narrative of which he characterizes as a repressed dream of incest memory. He then proceeds to spell out this narrative with precision, along with the rationale for particular aesthetic choices.37 His explanation is valuable to viewers in part because it elucidates the intricacies of the films story, which are difficult to apprehend in viewing. Clearly, the viewer senses a narrative unfoldingin the films opening moments, a man boards a bus, a young girl has what appears to be a birthday party, and clocks are obviously a central motifbut the connective tissue remains obscure. In general, however, the film is richer for its ambiguities; the trace becomes more important than the particulars. Solomon also employs this strategy in In Memoriam, which qualifies as an elliptical narrative on at least two levels. When viewed in order of their completion, the films cue the viewer to intuit an ongoing narrative on the basis of textual evidence. In this regard, In Memoriam is a typical elliptical narrative. The second level, which entails contextual knowledge and therefore is less available to the viewer, can be considered a kind of meta-narrative of Solomons relationship with LaPore, which is embedded in allusions, references, and motifs that are spread throughout the films. On the surface, the films are similar enough that the viewer is invited to make connections between them. Broadly speaking, all four seem to occupy the same diegesis, undoubtedly because they were produced from the same game. Certain settings reappear, such as the ocean, which figures prominently in Rehearsals, Last Days, and, to a lesser extent, Still Raining. The forest in Rehearsals seems to be the same location from Crossroad. Furthermore, the weather remains consistent from film to film, reinforcing the impression that all four take place in the same general environment. Even the title of the last film, Still Raining, Still Dreaming, seems to allude to similarities in weather and activities. Nonetheless, our sense of a unified diegesis is thwarted by the fact that each film retains a distinctive look that separates it from the others. Crossroad and Rehearsals are most alike, but the latter boasts a color palette and a greater variety of locations that sets it apart from its predecessor. Last Days is perhaps the most distinctive, as its crisp black-and-white imagery and use of famous California landmarks are not repeated in the others. These differences are pronounced enough that they frustrate the viewers attempts to generalize too broadly about the relations between the films.
36. p. 4. 37. Gunning, Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Klahr, LaPore and Solomon, Phil Solomon, The Frame, Millennium Film Journal 35/36 (Fall 2000), pp. 12135.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

103

In Memoriam also features multiple protagonists and seems to be structured around a quest, although the object remains elusive. That is, in the behavior of the characters and purposefulness of the camera movements, the films appear to document an ongoing search, but the details are never entirely clear. In the first two films, CJ functions as a protagonist. In Crossroad, he alternates between staring contemplatively into the distance and running through a dense thicket of branchesbut what is he thinking about, and what is he trying to find? In Rehearsals, CJ returns, but his appearance is different; he is depicted wearing a black gimp suit that obscures his face. What has prompted the change? CJ returns in Last Days, but his presence is diminished; he also shares screen time with two female characters, but who are they? We may assume that the story has shifted gears completely, but the characters adopt the same ruminative poses, suggesting that they, too, are searching for something obscure or deciding their next moves. Furthermore, in the last three films, the quest structure extends to the movement of the camera, which is constantly tracking forward, as if on the prowl. It passes through fences and surveys shop windows and empty rooms, but the target of its search never seems to be found. When we do witness a narrative event, it is usually after the facthouses and planes are on fire, suggesting that something significant has happened, but the film never elaborates. Rehearsals, in particular, often seems set in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. Meanwhile, Solomon weaves a number of motifs throughout the series that suggest a narrative lurking in the background. The spinning bouquet, prominent in Crossroad, reappears in Rehearsals. In all four films, planes glide across the sky. As has been mentioned, the apocalypse, a theme that has appeared in a number of Solomons films, is referenced explicitly in Last Days and implicitly in the others.38 Flying hearses meet watery demises in both Rehearsals and Last Days. These consistencies hint at a unifying narrative thread by suggesting that, like typical narratives, elements introduced will later reappear. The films encourage viewers to notice and organize patterns, but it is ultimately impossible (not to mention undesirable) to subsume those patterns to a linear chain of events connected by causal logic. As mentioned, there is a second level of elliptical narrative in In Memoriam, a meta-commentary on Solomons relationship with LaPore that is embedded in a dense network of allusions. Throughout the series, Solomon uses the games imagery to weave a personal narrative that obliquely references LaPore, their connection to the avant-garde, popular culture that both found inspiring, and artworks that share similar thematics. For instance, the series of pans across shop windows in Still Raining cites LaPores film The Sleepers (1989), as well as Nathaniel Dorskys films, especially Variations (1998), which feature comparable images. Solomon and LaPore initially met at the University of Binghamton, where legendary filmmaker Nicholas Ray taught. Consequently, Last Days in a Lonely Place
38. Solomon claims that he has always been drawn to apocalypt ic visions in general in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5, p. 221.

Solomon. Still Raining, Still Dreaming. 2009.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

105

makes heavy use of dialogue from Rays Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place (1950), in addition to the titular affinities. The titles of all the films allude to troubled musicians, three of whom committed suicide. Crossroad invokes Robert Johnsons famous encounter with the devil; Rehearsals for Retirement is a song by Phil Ochs; Last Days references Gus Van Sants film about Kurt Cobain; and Still Raining, Still Dreaming is the title of a Jimi Hendrix song. Many of these associations are visually reinforced, as CJ actually resembles Robert Johnson and both Solomons and Van Sants films include complicated tracking shots, many of which follow figures from behind. The soundtrack of Still Raining is taken directly from Song of Ceylon (1934), a film that LaPore, an experimental ethnographer, wanted to remake. Of course, many viewers will not understand the significance of these allusions without knowing a great deal about the personal histories of Solomon and LaPore. Others, however, will pick up a reference now and again, perhaps to Hendrix, Rebel, or the Vertigo-inspired shot of the Golden Gate Bridge in Last Days. By incorporating these citations without clarifying their importance, Solomon adds a second layer of elliptical narrative. The viewer catches a series of references that seem to (and indeed do) point to an organizing narrative principle, but for most, the personal implications remain obscure. In 16mm films such as The Secret Garden and Remains to Be Seen, Solomon reworks his fathers old home movies on an optical printer, but the viewer may not entirely grasp the connection. In In Memoriam, he carries this strategy into digital filmmaking, personalizing source material that would seem to be emphatically impersonal. As 16mm becomes an increasingly antiquated format, avant-garde filmmakers have been forced to rethink the basic conditions of their art. With many established filmmakers turning to digital technology, it seems logical to declare a revolution in avant-garde aesthetics, or at least a decisive break from the past. This is especially pertinent for the avant-garde because of its long-standing engagement with medium specificity, from the quality of light in Brakhages films to the reflexivity of Structural film. Consequently, the argument that the most promising digital work will be that which uniquely engages its mediumthat rigorously interrogates the aesthetic particularities of digital video, presumably producing a Text of Light (1974) or Serene Velocity (1970) for the digital ageis an appealing one. According to this line of thought, a reading of In Memoriam emphasizing the degree to which it calls attention to the absence of a physical world would most accurately capture Solomons achievement because it suggests a medium-specific argument: Solomon has embraced the essence of digital image-making by underscoring its immateriality. As I hope to have demonstrated, however, In Memoriam draws equally upon representational conventions derived from the celluloid-based filmmaking of the poetic avant-garde. These include compositional rigor, an emphasis on atmosphere and texture, polyvalent montage, and elliptical narratives. This does not

106

OCTOBER

denigrate but rather enhances Solomons achievement. By capitalizing upon the games built-in limitations and design particularities (and, in some instances, flaws), Solomon engages meaningfully with both cinematic and digital aesthetics, resulting in films that are at once outgrowths of GTA and entirely of Solomons own making. The strange disconnect that results from applying cinematic techniques to the digital realm is precisely what accounts for the films singularity. If we follow Solomons example, a prognosis for avant-garde cinema in the era of digital media must acknowledge the profound continuities between celluloid and code, a view that is informed by immediate context as well as the history of avant-garde cinema. Furthermore, as Solomon proves, drawing upon older avant-garde traditions provides one avenue for filmmakers to push digital aesthetics in challenging new directions. Solomons latest project, American Falls (2010), is a site-specific media installation made on film and featuring the emulsion-decay techniques that characterized his preIn Memoriam work. For its premiere at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the film was transferred to digital and projected on six consecutive panels in the museums rotunda. As this example attests, in Solomons recent film and video work, the old world meets the new, suggesting that the most exciting developments in the avant-garde over the next decade could well incorporate both the cinematic and the digital.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist*

MALCOLM TURVEY

The work of Ken Jacobs, writes Tom Gunning in his seminal essay about the filmmaker, teaches us to watch movies with a vision akin to both X-ray and microscope, uncovering what is concealed and paying attention to what is generally ignored.1 Jacobss Perfect Film (1985)a compilation of discarded outtakes from television news footage shot in the immediate aftermath of Malcolm Xs assassinationreveals things that the people on camera never intended to reveal,2 and in general, as Gunning put it to Jacobs in a 1989 interview, his works reveal, unmask. (To which Jacobs responded with a pun: Reveal masks. Well, I agree with you.)3 Gunning turns to Walter Benjamins notion of the optical unconsciousfirst advanced, according to Rosalind Krauss, in Benjamins 1931 essay Small History of Photography4to understand Jacobss revelatory project: Walter Benjamin declared that cinema shared with psychoanalysis an ability to probe into realms of reality of which we were not previously conscious, Gunning remarks.5 Jacobs uses the basic tools of his filmmaking to fracture the overwhelming familiarity of the moving image, blocking our most ingrained visual habits so that something else could take place.6 In fact, as Gunning acknowledges, long before Benjamin, film theorists and filmmakers had argued that the cinemas most important property is its capacity to make visible truths about reality partially or wholly invisible to human sight, and they frequently compared the cinema to revelatory visual technologies
* Thanks to Federico Windhausen, who knows much more about the work of Ken Jacobs than I, for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay and his help in selecting and preparing material for this issue. Thanks, as well, to Annette Michelson for her editorial advice, and to Adam Lehner for his (seemingly infinite) patience. 1. Tom Gunning, Films That Tell Time: The Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken Jacobs, in Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective, exh. cat., ed. David Schwartz (New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989), p. 6. 2. Ibid. 3. Tom Gunning and David Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, in Films That Tell Time, p. 38. 4. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 178. 5. Gunning, Films That Tell Time, p. 7. 6. Ibid. OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 107124. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

108

OCTOBER

Kino-eye is understood as that which the eye doesnt see, as the microscope and telescope of time, Dziga Vertov famously wrote in 1924.7 Their work, I have argued elsewhere, constitutes a distinct tradition in film historyrevelationismand Jacobs is one of this traditions most important and brilliant contemporary practitioners, extending it into the digital era.8 What distinguishes revelationism is its embrace of both the cinemas capacity to reproduce reality, as beloved by realists such as Andr Bazin, and its ability to transform reality, as celebrated by modernists like Rudolf Arnheim. Jacobs often echoes Bazins claim about the ontological realism of photography, its capacity to force us to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced.9 Because photographs have a causal relation to their subjects, writes Berys Gaut in explaining ontological realism, it follows that the subject of the photograph existed at the time the photograph was made: one cannot photograph something that does not exist.10 In discussing the found footage and photographs that he employs in his films and performances, Jacobs has said, These arent mere images on a screen. Life took place in front of a camera. There really was this Woodrow Wilson. They really did shake hands.11 Elsewhere, Jacobs has remarked that he uses found material because it is imperative for him to touch the past. Im very aware that these are not just shots; these are things, life, that happened in front of the camera. Im very interested in getting to that moment.12 Yet unlike realists, Jacobs does not hesitate to overtly alter recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. Im studying the evidence of fixed emulsion particles, he has declared, and I want my tampering with the evidence to be evident.13 Jacobs manipulates found films and old photographs using a variety of techniques, including ones employed by his revelationist forebears. When asked by David Schwartz about his use of slow motion in his Nervous System performancesin which he slowly advances, frameby-frame, two prints of the same film on two projectorsJacobs objected: I tend to think of it in a way that Dziga Vertov talks about it, as an expansion rather than a slowing down, as a magnification of time. Nothing has been actually slowed down, were just finding more time in that time.14 Vertov often attributed his discovery of the revelatory power of cinema to seeing a short, slow-motion film of himself leaping off a building in 1918. Didnt recognize my face on the screen, he remarked. My thoughts were revealed on my
7. Dziga Vertov, Birth of Kino-Eye, in Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OBrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 41. 8. On revelationism, see my Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 9. Andr Bazin, Ontology of the Photographic Image, in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 13. 10. Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 67. 11. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 41. 12. Julie Hampton, An Interview with Ken Jacobs, Millennium Film Journal 32/33 (Fall 1998), http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ32%2C33/hampton.htm (accessed May 26, 2011). 13. Ken Jacobs, Addenda to Interview, in Films That Tell Time, p. 61. 14. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 33.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

109

facehesitation, vacillation, firmness (a struggle with myself), and again, the joy of victory. First thought of the kino-eye as a world perceived without a mask, as a world of naked truth (truth cannot be hidden).15 Other revelationists, particularly Jean Epstein and Bla Balzs, have also singled out the cinemas ability to make the inner man visible, as Balzs put it, and Jacobs is no exception. In discussing the people inter viewed about Malcolm Xs assassination in the outtakes that make up Perfect Film, Jacobs notes, So many things are revealed, such as the way one acts in front of a camera and what it means to be on television, and he goes on to suggest that his films have often been concerned with uncovering the transition between face and mask, the moment at which the person backstage puts down their coffee cup and steps onstage and into the role.16 (Such a moment, as P. Adams Sitney notes, occurs in Blonde Cobra [195963], when Jack Smith, during one of his improvised monologues about a lonely little boy, suddenly switches from third to fir st per son to reveal the trauma of his own loneliness as a child.17) However, again like Vertov, Jacobss revelatory impulse extends beyond uncovering truths about the people and places preserved in found footage to exposing the properties of film itself, including the distinctive perceptual experiences it can create. In Man with a Dziga Vertov. Man with a Movie Camera. 1929. Movie Camera (1929), to cite one of many wellknown examples, a close-up of Elizavet a Svilova editing a strip of celluloid containing still frames of a boy laughing is followed by a shot consisting of these frames, now animated, so that the boy moves as he laughs. Cinemas impression of motion is thereby revealed to be an illusion created out of still images. Jacobs also views illusion and its unmasking as enabling other kinds of knowledge, not available before.18 In Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son (196971), in addition to slowing down, stopping, and reversing the projection of the 1905 original, so that the illusion of movement repeatedly dissolves into a series of still images, Jacobs at one point lets the entire print of the film run through the
15. 16. 17. 18. Vertov, quoted in Kino-Eye, pp. 4041. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, pp. 42, 43. P. Adams Sitney, The Ultimate Ken Jacobs, Artforum (May 2011), p. 265. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 33.

110

OCTOBER

projector in reverse with the pull-down mechanism disengaged. The result is a blur in which, occasionally, one can discern an individual frame or two when the print briefly slows. Jacobs also sometimes films the screen on which the original is projected from different angles and distances, and he even removes the screen to reveal the projector and its beam behind it . These techniques, along with numerous others, make visible the fact that we are watching a recording of a reel of celluloid Ken Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The consisting of still images being projected onto Pipers Son. 196971. a screen in a darkened space. Another hallmark of revelationism is its skepticism about human vision. Revelationists like Vertov altered recordings of reality in order to reveal truths about the world that, they believed, sight is incapable of seeing because of its limitations. Vertov argued that the human eye suffers from two fundamental defects, both of which the cinema can overcometemporal and spatial immobility, and disorganization. Jacobs also frequently remarks on the eyes capacity to be deceived: The serious avant-garde is less concerned with subject matter than with existential processes: what is it to know the world via our senses and the tools we use to feed those senses? We fool ourselves consciously, to ward off being duped by the particular mechanisms nature has provided humans.19 And like Vertov, he views our capacity to be fooled by visual illusions as playing a central role in political enslavement, which is why filmmakers must entertainingly expose the fraud: The recognized illusion is the death of the social delusion that keeps a populace infantilized, either by religion or the technology of images that leaders now employ to keep their flocks in line.20 However, his theory of the shortcomings of human vision owes little to Vertovs and is much more akin to Stan Brakhages formulation. Brakhage famously blamed language for our tendency to classify sights, to reduce the richness, wonder, and strangeness of visual experience to familiar, preexisting concepts and symbols. He therefore advocated a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication [that is] dependent on perception in the original and deepest sense of the word.21 Jacobs also frequently derides our tendency to ascribe to [sensory experience] a snug system of meanings, to channel things into language.22
19. Ken Jacobs, Three Letters on Czanne, in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 168. 20. Ibid., p. 169. 21. Stan Brakhage, From Metaphors on Vision, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), p. 120. 22. Ken Jacobs, Beating My Tom Tom, Exploding special issue on Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son (October 2000), p. 6.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

111

Reading a film for meanings is a sorry substitute for sensory experience. But things get out of hand, direct exper ience is LSD intractable and not everyone can lend themselves to the swim of things. The actuality of art just as of life can then become host to signs. For some of us such signs become the exclusive currency of thought. Symbolic parallel structures arise, often with a compelling beauty of their own (forget the art, forget the world). Passed on and elaborated, such structures can take on vivid local color even as they conform to the language-forming disposition of the human mind everywhere; behind the local color the mythic banalities, which, mind-made, feel so right to the mind. To doubt must be madness, and our tragedy is that so many will defendif not imposethe rightness of their big idea to the death, preferably of others. Ultimately each cultures passed-on idea of anything, i.e., its idea of what a dog is, becomes a tightly held religious concept. Non-literary sensory apprehension is left to modernist apostates. Get lost, I tell my students, And get lost again.23 Its not anti-intellectual to not wish to limit the intellect to words, alphabetic or ideographic, Jacobs continues, and, like Brakhage, he strives in many of his films and other works to create an adventure of perception for his viewers (One tries to offer people actual adventure, he has stated), to lead them to make visual discoveries in and through the moving image, which is more dramatic than any meaning.24 Unlike Brakhage, however, Jacobs typically does this by uncovering and exploring the neglected richness of found footage and photographs, which brings us to the second perceptual limitation he frequently points to in explaining his work. When watching a film, he says, you cant see it all. Youre usually looking from place to place. That means there are an infinite number of routes through the film that can actually be worked out when youre not looking at Ingrid Bergmans eyes.25 In addition, filmmakers, especially those who make precision entertainments, know exactly where the audience is looking on the screen, and theyre conducted on this path.26 Furthermore, narrative, and the anxious suspense it creates, tends to focus the viewers attention on what is going to happen next rather than what is occurring now.27 For all these reasons, viewers miss a great deal when watching a moving image, and it is this overlooked but boundless visual manifoldness that Jacobs seeks to recover in many of his films and performances by revealing the fascinating details and perceptual
23. 24. 25. 26. 27. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 8, 15. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 35. Ibid. Ibid., p. 36.

112

OCTOBER

effects of discarded imagery that probably went unnoticed when they were first exhibited.28 In this way, Jacobss desire to create a non-literary visual adventure for his viewers dovetails with his wish to touch the past. For example, by magnifying the face of a barely visible factory worker looking at the camera from behind rows of textile machines in a nineteenth-century stereograph in Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), Jacobs both uncovers a detail of the original stereograph that is easy to miss and encourages the viewer to contemplate a real person, to wonder who he was, what he was thinking about and doing at the precise moment the photographs were taken, and what subsequently happened to him. The same is true of Jacobss use of eternalism (discussed later) and other processes for enhancing the illusion of depth in his films and performances, which both dynamize the image, rendering it more visually fascinating through the creation of often otherworldly, ambiguous depth impressions, and make the figures captured in the image appear more life-like and therefore present. For Jacobs, illusion is a means to other kinds of knowledge, including an awareness of an easily forgotten past that, through its illusory fullness and presence in the image, can be acknowledged. The best thing you can do in this arrangement of the present, Jacobs has said, is honor the once all-in-color reality of that one, that it was the present the way this is the present. Another sunny day, with terrible things happening.29 As Federico Windhausen has astutely pointed out, this is how the formal and the social meet for Jacobs: on the ground of a shared utopian belief in the possibility of a much richer seeing and comprehension.30 Jacobss revivification of the visual possibilities of discarded imagery is at the same time an ethical, even political, reanimation of the past and those Jacobs sees as its forgotten victims, such as factory workers. Or at least it was. For Capitalism: Child Labor, along with all of Jacobss films since 1999, is a digital video, and according to many new-media theorists, it is precisely the connection with the past, and with reality in general, that digital video forecloses because of its purported lack of indexicality. For the indexical image, through its physical connection, touches the real, bears its impression, and hence assures us that it is still there; while the digital image has the potential to abstract and isolate itself, severing any connection with an autonomous reality, writes Mary Ann Doane.31 The index makes that claim by virtue of its privileging of contact, of touch, of a physical connection. The digital can make no such claim and, in fact, is defined as its negation.32 Is Jacobs mistaken or confused in thinking that he can continue to touch the past using digital video in place of celluloid film?
28. Ibid., p. 40. 29. Ibid., p. 41. 30. Federico Windhausen, Theories of Moving Pictures: Ken Jacobs After Hans Hofmann, in Optic Antics, p. 243. 31. Mary Ann Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, Differences 18, no. 1 (2007), pp. 14042. 32. Ibid., p. 142.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

113

The index is, of course, a concept taken from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and first applied to film by Peter Wollen in the late 1960s in order to explain the nature of cinematic signs.33 Peirces writings are, in the words of Joel Snyder, exceptionally complex, demanding, and often obscure, and his famous division of signs into icons, indices, and symbols is just one of a number of typologies the philosopher proposed and modified throughout his life.34 (By his own count, Peirces final typology contains sixty-six classes of signs, most of which are ignored by theorists of film and photography.) According to Peirce scholar Albert Atkin, common to Peirces many attempts to define the index is the claim that indices use some physical contiguity with their object to direct attention to that object.35 The index, wrote Peirce in 1885, like a pronoun demonstrative or relative, forces the attention to the particular object intended without describing it,36 and again in the early 1900s he asserted that anything which focuses the attention is an index.37 Peirce gave as examples signs that focus attention on objects because of a predictable causal relationship between them, as when smoke is a sign of fire. It is because of the causal relation between photographs and their objects that Peirce himself argued that photographs are indices. But his examples of indices also include signs such as the polestar, which indicates the north, or a pointing finger that indicates the direction to be followed, where there is no dyadic or causal relationship between an index and its object.38 Furthermore, according to Peirce, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality.39 Thus, contrary to what some have claimed, many digital images, even computer-generated ones, qualify as indices in the Peircean sense if only because no sign is absolutely devoid of the indexical quality.40 A drawing, painting, or computer-generated image of a finger outside a restaurant pointing toward its entrance can be an index of the entrance, as can a digital photograph of a finger pointing toward the entrance, or indeed a digital photograph of the restaurants owner pointing toward it. All three can focus the attention of passersby on the restaurant entrance, and they can do so in part thanks to their physical contiguity to it, even though none have a causal relationship to it.
33. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). 34. Joel Snyder, Pointless, in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 378. 35. Albert Atkin, Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 41, no. 1 (Winter 2005), p. 163. 36. Charles Sanders Peirce, One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and Nature, in The Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 5 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 243. 37. Charles Sanders Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. and intro. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 108. 38. Atkin, Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference, p. 167. 39. Peirce, Logic as Semiotic, p. 108. 40. On the fact that, for Peirce, all signs are in some respect indexical, see the excellent discussion in Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau, Digital Editing and Montage: The Vanishing Celluloid and Beyond, Cinmas: Journal of Film Studies 13, nos. 12 (2002), p. 93.

114

OCTOBER

Theorists such as Doane are aware of the breadth of Peirces definition of an index, which is why she suggests that celluloid-based photographs are indexical in a different, narrower sense. Echoing Bazins controversial claim that photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction, she argues that, like a stain, photographs are created by objects physically touching and leaving behind a trace of themselves on a surface.41 When the index is exemplified by the footprint or the photograph, she writes, it is a sign that can be described as a trace or imprint of its object. Something of the object leaves a legible residue through the medium of touch. . . . Only [this] definition the index as imprint or trace (preeminently the footprint)seems to correspond to the cinematic image.42 It is in the sense of contact, of touch that celluloid-based photographs are indexical and digital ones arent, she believes. However, it is difficult to see how a celluloid-based photograph is touched by its objects. Doane seems to think that it is the light rays bouncing off the objects in front of a celluloid-based camera and reacting with the photochemical surface inside the camera that enable those objects to touch and thereby imprint or inscribe the resultant photograph. Light, as the physical connection, affects the photochemical base in such a way that it bears the imprint of the object, she writes.43 But while we sometimes speak metaphorically of being touched by objects that emit or reflect light (I want to be one who is touched by the sun, sings Carly Simon), it is not literally the case that those objects physically touch us via the light they reflect or emit. I am not physically touched by President Obama just because the light rays bouncing off his body and entering my eyes enable me to see him in the distance at a political rally, just as I am not physically touched by a wall when I bounce a ball against the wall and the ball hits my head. Meanwhile, if I use a magnifying glass to focus light rays on my arm and burn my skin, it is not the magnifying glass that is physically touching me and imprinting my arm by burning it but the light rays it is magnifying. Thus, if by index is meant a sign that is physically touched by its object, then neither celluloidbased nor digital photographs are indexical.44
41. Bazin, Ontology of the Photographic Image, p. 14. Bazins claim about the ontological identity of photograph and object has been interpreted differently by different scholars. Daniel Morgan argues that Bazin is literally denying that there is an ontological distinction between image and object, although he admits that he is unable to offer a coherent formulation of this claim (Morgan, Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry 32 [Spring 2006], pp. 45051). Much more plausibly, Jonathan Friday has suggestedgiven that Bazin himself stated that no one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image (Bazin, Ontology of the Photographic Image, p. 10)that Bazins claim should be construed as a phenomenological one about the way photographs present themselves to consciousness (Friday, Andr Bazins Ontology of Photographic and Film Imagery, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 4 [Fall 2005], p. 340). 42. Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, p. 136. 43. Ibid. 44. Even if the photochemical surface inside a celluloid-based camera is somehow touched by the objects in front of the camera by way of the light rays that bounce off those objects and react with it, this would still mean that many celluloid-based photographs are not indexical, given that most such photographs are prints taken from negatives and have not themselves been in physical contact with the objects they depict via the light rays reflected off those objects.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

115

It might be argued that, unlike digital photographs, celluloid-based photographs are indexical in the sense that they are physical traces of their objects even though their objects dont physically touch them. After all, something can leave behind a physical trace of itself on a surface without actually touching that surface. I can, for example, write my name in the sand using a stick or on a blackboard using a piece of chalk. I can also use a magnifying glass to focus light rays onto a tree trunk and burn my name into it. In none of these cases am I touching these surfaces or the signs I imprint on them, even though I am leaving behind physical traces of myself. Similarly, someone might claim, an object leaves behind a physical trace of itself on a photochemical surface when light bounces off that object, is focused by the lens onto the photochemical surface inside a camera, and reacts with that surface. Meanwhile, in the case of a digital camera, the light reflected off an object in front of the camera is detected by a light sensor inside it and translated into a binary code that is stored on a hard drive or some other storage device. There is thus no surface on which to leave a physical trace. The digital, writes Doane, represents the vision (or nightmare) of a medium without materiality, of pure abstraction incarnated as a series of 0s and 1s, sheer presence and absence, the code. Even light, that most diaphanous of materialities, is transformed into numerical form in the digital camera.45 However, as the example of writing ones name on a surface demonstrates, traces can be left behind in a symbolic code, so this alone does not disqualify digital photographs from being indexical. A seismograph and an electrocardiograph translate their objectsthe movement of the ground and heartbeatsinto symbolic codes, but this does not stop them from recording traces of their objects (as does a barometer, one of Peirces examples of an index). And, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has argued, it is demonstrably false that the digital is a medium without materiality: Electronic textuality is [physically] locatable, even though we are not accustomed to thinking of it in physical terms. Bits can be measured in microns when recorded on a magnetic hard disk. They can be visualized with technologies such as magnetic force microscopy (MFM), which is a variation on the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). When a CD-ROM is burned, a laser superheats a layer of dye to create pits and lands, tiny depressions on the grooved surface of the platter. The length of these depressions is measured in microns, their width and depth in nanometers.46 Data stored electronically using digital media is just as much an inscribed trace, an intervention in or modification of a physical substratum, as a name written on a blackboard or burned onto a tree trunk.47 When a bit is written to a hard drive, for
45. Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, p. 142. 46. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), p. 3. 47. Ibid., pp. 5859.

116

OCTOBER

example, it is converted to a voltage that is passed through the drives read/write head where the current creates an electromagnetic field reversing the polarity of not one but several individual magnetic dipolesa whole pattern of flux reversals embedded in the material substrate of the disk.48 New-media theorists, according to Kirschenbaum, often overlook the physical processes and inscriptions involved in electronically storing data such as digital photographs on hard drives and other devices in part because these processes are invisible to the naked human eye, and in part because such theorists tend to buy into the myth of such datas being purely abstract and immaterial. But just because something is invisible does not mean it is not there. Digital photographs are just as much non-contact physical traces of their objects as celluloid-based ones, even though those traces cannot be seen with the naked human eye. They are also mechanically generated non-contact physical traces, which is why digital photographs can be as ontologically realistic and epistemically reliable as celluloid-based ones. The evidential authority of photography lies, according to Gregory Currie, in the fact that a camera, when working properly, is independent of the intentional states of its operator in the sense that it records what is in front of it, not what the cameraperson thinks or believes is in front of it. By contrast, however reliable and accurate, a handmade representational image such as a painting depicts what its maker thinks or believes is in front of him or her. Hence a photograph can, for example, record something that the cameraperson is unaware of while taking the photograph, such as an unseen person.49 All of this is true of digital photography too, which is why newspapers such as the New York Times publish digital photographs as visual evidence of the news they are reporting. Of course, as many have argued, it is easier to alter photographs undetected and create photorealistic images of nonexistent things using computer software than it is with celluloid-based processes, and this might mean that digital photographs lack the evidential weight of traditional photographs.50 But as Gunning has argued in a text that deserves to be widely read because of its level-headedness about these (and other) matters, traditional photography . . . also possesses processes that can attenuate, ignore, or even undo the indexical, as famous hoaxes using celluloid-based photographs attest . 51 Thus, the difference bet ween digit al and film-based photography cannot be described as absolute.52 Rather than a break with traditional celluloid-based photography, Gunning concludes, correctly in my view, that the introduction of digital technologies should be seen as akin to earlier
48. Ibid., p. 89. 49. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 5455. 50. Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, p. 70. 51. Tom Gunning, Whats the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs, Nordicom Review 12 (2004), p. 41. 52. Ibid.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

117

technological developments in the practice and art of photography, such as the conquering of exposure time with instantaneous photography.53 Jacobs is not wrong, therefore, to believe that he can continue to touch the past in his digital videos, at least in the sense that the celluloid-based footage and photographs he uses in them remain physical non-contact traces of their subjects despite having been digitized and then manipulated using computer software.54 Nor has the move to digital brought about a rupture in Jacobss practice, although its affordability and ease of use have made him a more prolific filmmaker. Rather, as William Rose has pointed out, digital technologies have enabled Jacobs to emulate and expand the visual effects developed in his celluloid-based Nervous System performances and preserve them on digital video (which is perhaps one reason Jacobs ceased these performances upon switching to digital).55 A good example is eternalism, Jacobss patented method for creating an illusion of sust ained, ongoing mot ion with a degree of three- dimensionalit y. 56 Jacobs pioneered eternalism in his Nervous System performances by projecting two almost identical film frames from two prints of the same film. As Rose describes it, An exterior shutter, in the form of a spinning propeller positioned between the two projectors, is used to rapidly alternate between, and blend together, the two frames by interrupting the projections with imageless intervals.57 Jacobs frequently achieves the effect of eternalism in his digital videos by quickly switching back and forth between two slightly different representational images from a film or stereograph and a third black image, which is why he has been able to adapt some of his Nervous System performances to digital video.58 It is not just visual effects from these performances that Jacobs has imitated and extended on digital video, however. He also uses computer software to imitate the techniques for drawing the viewers attention to overlooked details of the moving image that he employed in Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son, as can be shown by briefly comparing the film to one of Jacobss digital reconsiderations of the original Tom, Tom, appropriately titled Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008). As Jacobs has noted, the
53. Ibid., p. 48. 54. It might be objected that Jacobss digital videos are traces of traces. While the found footage and photographs he uses in them are traces of the subjects they depict, once this found material is digitized, the resulting digital videos are traces of this found material, not the subjects it depicts. This is because these digital videos are not direct recordings of those subjects but rather direct recordings of the original celluloid-based recordings, themselves direct, of those subjects. However, if this is true, then it is also true of most film prints, which are, like most celluloid-based photographs, taken from negatives and are not themselves direct recordings of the subjects they depict. 55. William Rose, Annotated Filmography and Performance History, in Optic Antics, p. 265. 56. Ken Jacobs, Eternalism, a method for creating an appearance of sustained three-dimensional motion-direction of unlimited duration, using a finite number of pictures, U.S. Patent 7218339, May 15, 2007. 57. Rose, Annotated Filmography and Performance History, p. 270. 58. For example, the Nervous System performance Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy (1997) has been released on digital video as Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye, Molly (2005).

118

OCTOBER

Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son. 196971.

staging and cutting of the 1905 Tom, Tom is pre-Griffith.59 When the film was made, American filmmakers were only just beginning to develop the mise-en-scne and variable framing conventions for ensuring narrative clarity that would come to predominate in Hollywood cinema from the 1910s onward. Each event is filmed in what appears to be a single shoteight in totalwith the stationary camera positioned at some distance from the action perpendicular to the painted sets. While the narratively important characters tend to be placed closest to the camera in the middle of the settings, there are no zooms, camera movements, or cut-ins to closer views to render their actions clearly visible. As a result, especially during the first crowded shot, which contains approximately twenty characters competing for the viewers attention, one cannot help but miss much of what is happening. This includes the narratively crucial event of Tom stealing the pig, which is almost completely hidden behind a juggler bending down to pick up his dropped balls. Jacobs reports that when he first watched the film he did not see the theft of the pig, and, since he was unacquainted with the nursery rhyme on which the film is based, it seemed to him that the chase that ensues had no recognizable purpose at all.60 In filming the screen on which the original Tom, Tom was projected for his 1969 film, Jacobs used techniques of variable framing that American filmmakers began employing shortly after the 1905 Tom, Tom was made. As Nol Carroll has pointed out, variable framing allows filmmakers to control the viewers attention to a much greater degree than is possible in the other visual arts. 61 To use Carrolls terminology, by zooming in or moving the camera toward an object, a
59. Jacobs, Program Notes, in Films That Tell Time, p. 22. 60. Jacobs, Beating My Tom Tom, p. 6. 61. Nol Carroll, The Power of Movies, in Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

119

filmmaker can index it, suggesting to the viewer that he pay attention to it, much like the gesture of pointing. These techniques can also exclude or bracket what surrounds the object, so that the viewer literally cannot pay attention to anything else onscreen. They also change the scale of an object so that it fills up more screen space, which further suggests that the object should be attended to by the viewer or forces the viewer to do so. Jacobs uses variable framing in tandem with slowing, stopping, reversing, and repeating the film to reveal not just occluded narrative events such as the theft of the pig but easily missed details of the actors performances along with properties and perceptual effects of celluloid film that have little or no relevance to the narrative. Consider the theft of the pig, which is the first event Jacobs scrutinizes following the projection of the original Tom, Tom in its entirety. He begins with a medium shot of the legs of the character whom Jacobs has come to call Little Billy as he moves around at the front of the crowd until he is approached by someone who hands him the pig on a leash. Jacobs then cuts to a wider shot of a still frame of Tom looking at the pig, briefly advances the film, and then stops it again to reveal Tom once more gazing at the pig. After an extreme close-up of the image in which only slowly moving light, shadow, and film grain are discernible, Jacobs cuts back to a medium shot of the juggler and Tom followed by a long shot of the two that includes Little Billy and a few onlookers. Slowly, Jacobs advances the film as the juggler begins his act, moves forward in front of Tom to retrieve his dropped balls, and Tom turns and runs away from the camera toward the back of the set with the pig, Little Billy following closely behind. After a shot of the films title, Jacobs returns to a still frame, again in long shot, of the juggler standing in front

Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son. 196971.

120

OCTOBER

Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son. 196971.

of Tom, having just picked up his balls, and he cuts to ever closer shots of Tom barely visible behind the juggler. Slowly, he advances the film as Tom and Little Billy, now in close-up, turn and run. Jacobs next moves even closer to the image and, stopping the film once more, tilts the camera up and down Little Billys body. He slowly advances the film again as the onlookers begin chasing the boys, only their legs visible, and, having stopped the film, he zooms out to reveal the juggler, now alone on the set. Most of these details are extremely difficult to apprehend when watching the original, but Jacobss variable framing makes them clearly visible by bracketing the onlookers, enlarging Tom, Little Billy, and the Juggler, and indexing their actions. 2008s Return to the Scene of the Crime, unlike its celluloid predecessor, consists exclusively of an examination of the first crowded shot of the 1905 Tom, Tom; the theft of the pig, which Jacobs now equates with the financial crisis that began in 2008, occurs at its end instead of toward the beginning. In addition to eternalisms, Jacobs uses digital effects that have no equivalents in the 1969 film. For example, as the juggler, whom Jacobs now refers to as God, performs in front of the crowd, his balls are replaced by frames from the film, which circle above him with increasing rapidity until Jacobs freezes the image. Nevertheless, interspersed with such purely digital effects is a use of variable framing to uncover yet more details of the original. As God begins to juggle, several shots from different dist ances reveal him grabbing his crotch, thereby further unearthing the films sexual subtext, which has long fascinated Jacobs. And when he bends down to retrieve his balls, Jacobs slows the action by advancing

Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son. 196971.

Jacobs. Return to the Scene of the Crime. 2008.

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist

123

through a series of eternalisms one frame at a time and zooming in for a closer view. This repetition of frames enables the viewer to closely study the event. An intertitle directs the viewer to pay attention to Toms theft of the pig behind God, and after a brief long shot and another intertitle, Jacobs cuts back to the moment prior to the theft when Tom and Little Billy, now centered in the frame, are watching the juggling. A medium shot of God and Tom is followed by a medium close-up of their heads as God bends down to pick up his balls and Tom steals the pig. Jacobs then repeats the footage of Tom and Little Billy watching the juggling in a wider shot and, with Tom centered in the frame, slows

Jacobs. Return to the Scene of the Crime. 2008.

it down as God moves forward and Tom grabs the leash of the pig. Jacobs cuts to a still frame of God bent down in front of Tom, zooms in, and then cuts to an even closer view before zooming out. For good measure, he repeats the theft one final time in a long shot using eternalisms. Of course, the camera is not really zooming, moving, or cutting in to closer views in this digital video, as there is no lens, camera, or film to cut. Rather, digital software is emulating these celluloid-based techniques. Yet their function is the sameto make easily overlooked details of the original evident by indexing and enlarging them, and bracketing distracting information. Much like t he filmmaker s discussed by John Power s and Feder ico

124

OCTOBER

Windhausen elsewhere in this issue of October, Jacobs is using digital technologies to imitate techniques he first honed in his celluloid-based work. To be sure, he is also creating digital effects that have no equivalents in that work, thereby expanding his practice in new directions. But while these effects might be new, their underlying purpose remains the sameto create an adventure of perception for viewers. Inasmuch as this adventure continues to involve making visible truths about images and their contents that are partially or wholly invisible to human sight, Jacobs is extending the venerable tradition of revelationism, which originated in the silent era of celluloid-based cinema, into the digital age.

Miriam Hansen and the Legacies of Critical Theory

ANDREAS HUYSSEN
The loss of Miriam Hansen (19492011), who succumbed to her long battle with cancer earlier this year, is mourned by all of us engaged in the study of film and media aesthetics, the visual arts, literature, and public cultures at large in our contemporary world. Hansen found her voice as a deft mediator between American film and Frankfurt School theories of the public sphere, media, aesthetics, and mass culture. Her exceptionally imaginative and erudite work, culminating in the soon-to-be published Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno (University of California Press, 2012), has given us yet another Frankfurt School: critical theory as media aesthetics and theory of experience in Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. She had, in fact, studied with Adorno and Jrgen Habermas at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitt in Frankfurt am Main, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1975 with a dissertation on Ezra Pounds avant-gardist poetics. When she moved from Germany to the United States and from writing in German to writing in English, she also moved from literature to film studies. Pivotal for Hansens early work on American silent film was the inspiration of German filmmaker, theorist, storyteller, and producer Alexander Kluge (himself a friend and close associate of Adorno), with whom she shared a long and collaborative friendship and whose film work rests on a creative transformation of the legacies of those three German exiles. Her first book in English, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship and American Silent Film (1991), set a new standard for the history, analysis, and theory of early film. Her focus on historically documented female spectatorship and the public sphere challenged then-popular theories of the cinematic apparatus and the male gaze as well as psychoanalytic readings of film, all of which were predicated on ideology critique (Marxist and feminist) and on the binar y of classical Hollywood cinema v s. avant- garde, especially Brechtian/Godardian, film practices. But it was the focus on early cinemas anarchic and materialist beginnings in the context of popular entertainment, acrobatic performance, the circus, and sen-

OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 125127. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

126

OCTOBER

sory spectacles of all kinds that led her to reread the media aesthetics of Kracauer and Benjamin as an attempt to address a later, largely marginalized if not betrayed potential of film as a politically radical medium. Kracauers privileging of distraction, clowns, slapstick, fairy tales, and the circus is as crucial here as Benjamins considerations of animation, Mickey Mouse, Chaplin, and concepts such as mimesis, the optical unconscious, innervation, and Spiel-Raum (room-for-play), all read in their complex intertextuality and interdependence. Without giving up on ideology critique, she read film, including classical Hollywood cinema, as a training ground for the new types of sensory experiences created by industrial and urban modernity. In a stunning reversal of standard, even Adornian critiques of Hollywood, she has taught us to see classical narrative cinema as engaged in what she called the mass production of the senses, new modes of organizing vision and shaping sensor y percept ion, including auralit y and t act ilit ycentral concerns in Benjamins work and again today in a very different media world. What emerged from the early-to-mid-twentieth century, with its mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation, was an international cinematic culture she felicitously described as vernacular modernism. American movies resonated transnationally, not just as a result of Hollywood hegemony but also because they articulated an experience of modernity that, despite all cultural differentiation, was becoming increasingly global. With this approach to American film as a global vernacular, Miriam reached well beyond film studies, arguing for a breakup of the stultifying and often provincial hierarchies of high vs. mass culture, high modernism vs. kitsch, Soviet avant-garde vs. Hollywood cinema, modernism vs. realism, and so forth. Of course, this work on the cinema parallels the rethinking of modernism and modernity initiated by the postmodernism debates that have flourished since the 1990s in several of the journals in which she published her influential essays. It speaks to the breadth of her interests and her intense curiosity in film cultures across the world that more recently she engaged with Chinese and Japanese film in the context of debates about alternative modernities and expanded geographies of modernism, work that will now have to be further developed by some of her students. Her career led her from Yale and Rutgers to the University of Chicago, where she was the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, which she founded in 1990, and guided and shaped ever since. But her main legacy to us will be her just-completed, marvelously rich and imaginative study Cinema and Experience. Here she gives us subtle readings of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno, weaving often disconnected threads into a tapestry of common concepts and concerns that highlights the closeness and distance between them in unexpected and novel ways. The triangulation of Adorno and

Miriam Hansen and the Legacies of Critical Theory

127

Benjamin with Kracauer permits us to think beyond the annoyingly persistent accounts pitting the Eurocentric mandarin against the progressive film and media theorist, a reductive cultural-studies view that ignores questions of aesthetics and fails to understand Benjamins reflections on media as part of his anthropological materialism. Triangulation also guarantees that the inspirational role of Kracauer for Benjamin is finally acknowledged and that Kracauer is freed from the widespread misunderstanding of his work on photography and film as a naive realism. Hansens reading of Kracauers essay on photography as the go for broke game of history provides a persuasive backdrop to Benjamins later investments in film as the go for broke game of politics during the ever more desperate days of the anti-fascist struggle. Who but Miriam Hansen would have been able to link Benjamins notion of auraexplicated in a much-broadened discursive and political contextto Adornos aesthetic of natural beauty? Who but she could have mobilized Adornos thought on rhythm, temporality, mobility, and tempo in post-1945 music for a consideration of what Adornian theory could have been had he translated his reflections on modernism in music into the medium of film? Thinking with Adorno beyond Adorno in modernist aesthetics, with Benjamin beyond Benjamin in media theory, with Kracauer beyond Kracauer on mass culture, she keeps the legacy of critical theory alive for an analysis of human experience and cultural practice today. The work of these three figures is not presented as canonical or as offering solutions to the media problematic of our time. But it is given credit for asking the right kinds of theoretical and political questions, which need to be rigorously set in their own time before they can be appropriated and rearticulated for our contemporary world of digital media and their impact on everyday life experience. Cinema as Experience is a rich source for further developing the legacies of critical theory, which now include, sadly, the legacy of Miriam Hansen herself.