Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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
32
OCTOBER
Ibid., p. 43.
James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 243.
Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, p. 30.
Identity Crisis
33
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
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.
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
Identity Crisis
37
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
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
Ibid.
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
48
OCTOBER
50
OCTOBER
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).
Copyright of October is the property of MIT Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites
or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.