AFTERIMAGES AND AFTERTHOUGHTS ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE OF FILM
A MEMORY OF RESISTANCE
Gerda Johanna Cammaer
A Research-Creation Thesis In the Department of Communication Studies
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada
December 2009
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14-1 Canada ABSTRACT
Afterimages and Afterthoughts about the Afterlife of Film: A Memory of Resistance.
Gerda Johanna Cammaer, Ph. D. Concordia University, 2009.
This thesis project, constructed as a "memory of resistance" (Gilles Deleuze), studies the transition to digital video in cinema (the so-called "death of film"). It explains and resists the simplicity and matter-of-factness with which this transition is usually presented, and explores the consequences and effects for both film studies and independent film production.
Following Walter Benjamin's famous Arcades Project, the work is constructed in a fragmented way as a collage of texts and images; series of experiments with historical and contemporary images are combined with different writing and editing techniques, multiple narratives and varying styles in the tradition of the surrealists and writers such as Roland Barthes (humanities, photography), Robert Ray (film studies) and the Belgian artist-filmmaker-writer Marcel Broodthaers.
Resisting habitual forms of Ph.D. theses in the humanities, this creative memory of resistance attempts to fulfill the Utopian aspect of philosophy and art. Hence, it resists simplistic ideas about linear time and history, constantly incorporating nonlinear, fragmented and multi-layered perspectives. It is a glimpse into a possible afterlife of film, retrieving, saving and reviving what otherwise might permanently be swallowed by our society's cultural amnesia. It traces and retraces some endangered analogue film history and analogue film practices and encourages a renewed interest in the medium as part of our collective memory, at a time when the way we communicate and preserve moving images is changing tremendously.
Made with evidence from various texts and discarded 16 mm and 8mm films selected for their potential to help show the complexity of the changes at hand, this research-creation project shows how celluloid film as a medium itself has both a high historical value and a strong resistance against the workings of time, since even damaged film images can still be used to tell us something valuable about our culture. In short: the strongest and most creative resistance against the so-called death of film is to be found in afterimages of medium itself, glimpses of a possible afterlife for film evoking many afterthoughts. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Besides the numerous people who helped out with moral and practical support, the author would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for their financial support in the form of a Doctoral Canadian Graduate Scholarship (CGS).
IV This work is dedicated to Dr. Rik Cammaer.
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Rethinking Film Studies 17
1.1 Introduction 17 1.2 Film Theory Past 20 1.3 Reinventing Film Studies 26 1.4 Re-introducing the Experiment in Film Studies 33 1.5 Building a Thesis Project 41 1.6 Rethinking Film History 50 1.7 Conclusion: Fissures and Fragments 60
Chapter 2: Research-Creation and Doctoral Degrees in Fine Arts 65
2.1 Introduction 65 2.2 Practice-Based PhDs and Questions of Academic Legitimacy 68 2.3 The Compromise Model 72 2.4 Modes of Research Through Creative Practice 75 2.5 Academic Equivalence: At What Cost? 80 2.6 Research-Creation: Section Cinema .85 2.7 Film = Art (experimental film) 86 2.8 Film = Essay-Writing (collage films) 90 2.9 Film = Writing (camera-stylo) 94 2.10 Conclusion: a Guide for How to Read this Thesis 98
Chapter 3: The Decaying Art of Film 100
3.1 Introduction: the A and B Rolls of my Research 100 A-ROLL: Early Prognoses about the 'Death of Film': Confusion and Pessimism 103 B-ROLL: Double Identity (digital video, 3min43s) 104 A-ROLL: The 'Death of Film', the Decay of Cinema: More Pessimism 108 B-ROLL: Stargate (HD video, 10min37s) 110 A-ROLL: More (Past)Prognoses Ill B-ROLL: DowWe Sfo/(digital video, 5min 13s) 114 A-ROLL: The Rapid Decay of Cinema and 'Cinephilia' 116 A-ROLL: Towards a Revival of (Small) Cinema 120 B-ROLL: Double Dutch (digital video, lmin49s) 122 A-ROLL: The Many Deaths of Film/Cinema 123 A-ROLL: Jean-Luc Godard works the Oracle 126 B-ROLL: Double Talk (digital video, 2min 39s) 130 A-ROLL: Death by Digital: a Replay? 131 A-ROLL: The Institutional and Material'Death of Film' 133 A-ROLL: Orphan Films 137 A-ROLL: What Is/Was Film? 144 B-ROLL: Double Jump (digital video, 12min 51s) 150 3.2 Conclusions: ,.151 A-ROLL: Manifesto #1: Is Film Biting the Dust? (15 statements): 151 B-ROLL: Manifesto #2: Stardust (15 minutes) (digital video) 154 CHAPTER 4: Film Decay as Art 156
4.1 Introduction 156 4.2 Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate (1990) 161 4.3 Bill Morrison's Decasia (2004) 166 4.4 Peggy Ahwesh's 77/e Color of Love (1994) 171 4.5 GustavDeutschFzVm/sf (1998/2002/2004) 175 4.6 The B-Film Keeper (digital video, 12min44s.) 182 4.7 Skindrums and Tattoos - A Mutilated Film (digital video, 5min 37s.) 188 4.8 1953 (digital video, 6min, 22s.) 190 4.9 Conclusion 194
Conclusion: This is Not a Film Museum 197
REFERENCES 216
Bibliography .216
Filmography 225
ANNEXES 227
Figure 1. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1974): 16mm Slug Film 228 Figure 2. Double Jump (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 229 Figure 3. Hot Shots! Part Deux (Jim Abrahams, 1993): 16mm Slug Film 230 Figure 4. Hot Shots! Part Deux (Jim Abrahams, 1993): 16mm Slug Film 231 Figure 5. Double Shot (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2007): Film Still 232 Figure 6. Unidentified film: 16mm Slug Film 233 Figure 7. Double Dutch (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2007): Film Still 234 Figure 8. You've Got Mail (NoraEphron, 1998): 16mm Slug Film 235 Figure 9. Double Talk (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 236 Figure 10. Unidentified Film: 16mm Slug Film 237 Figure 11. Unidentified Film: 16mm Slug Film 238 Figure 12. Unidentified Film: 16mm Slug Film 239 Figure 13. Double Jump (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009) 240 Figure 14. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Digital Photo Film Lab 241 Figure 15. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Digital Photo Film Lab 242 Figure 16. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Digital Photo Film Lab 243 Figure 17. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 244 Figure 18. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 245 Figure 19. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 246 Figure 20. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 247 Figure 21". Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 248 Figure 22. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 249 Figure 23. Unidentified Damaged Film: 16mm Film Scan 250 Figure 24. Unidentified Damaged Film: 16mm Film Scan 251 Figure 25. Unidentified Damaged Film: 16mm Film Scan 252 Figure 26. The B-Film Keeper (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 253 Figure 27. The B-Film Keeper (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 254 Figure 28. The B-Film Keeper (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 255 Figure 29. Belles ofthe South Seas (Castle Films, 1944): 16mmFilmScan 256 Figure 30. Belles ofthe South Seas (Castle Films, 1944): 16mm Film Scan 257 Figure 31. Belles ofthe South Seas (Castle Films, 1944): 16mm Film Scan 258 Figure 32. Skindrums and Tattoos (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 259 Figure 33. 1953 (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 260 Figure 34.1953 (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 261 Figure 35.1953 (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 262 Figure 36. R522A (Eric Rondepierre, 1995) 263 Figure 37. Rene Magritte, Lafemme cachee (1929) 264 Figure 38. Je ne voispas la (femme) cachee dans laforet, in: La revolution Surrealiste, Paris.no. 12, December 15,h, 1929 265 Figure 39. Lyrical Nitrate (Peter Delpeut, 1990): Cropped Film Still 267 Figure 40. Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2004): Film Still 268 Figure 4 I. The Color of Love (Peggy Ahwesh, 1994): Film Still 269 Figure 42. Film Is: Material (Gustav Deutsch, 1998): Film Still 270 Figure 43. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department, Film Section (1971 - 1972) 271 Figure 44. La Pluie (Marcel Broodthaers, 1969): 16 mm Film Strips 272 Figure 45. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department, FilmSection (1971 -1972): "Fig."- Signs on Film Screens 273 Figure 46. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department 274 Figure 47. Unidentified Film, Instituto Nacional de Cinema, Maputo, Mozambique 275 Figure 48. Film Dump, Instituto Nacional de Cinema, Maputo, Mozambique, 1999 276 Figure 49. Handbag made of 35mm postconsumer Bollywood film 277 Figure 50. Film Recycling Bin: The End 278
FILMS/VIDEOS (submitted on DVD):
DVD#1: Slug-Film Videos Double Identity (digital video, 3min 43 s) Double Shot (digital video, 5min 13s) Double Dutch (digital video, lmin 49s) Double Talk (digital video, 2min 39s) Double Jump (digital video, 12min 51s)
DVD#2: Stargate (HD video, lOmin 37s)
DVD#3: Stardust (digital video, 15 min.)
DVD#4: Keepsakes The B-Film Keeper (digital video, 12min 44s.) Skindrums and Tattoos-A Mutilated Film (digital video, 5min 37s.) 1953 (digital video, 6min, 22s.) INTRODUCTION: THE DEATH OF FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF RUINS
What we always believed was the most modern art is suddenly becoming antiquarian. The birth of film studies is concomitant with the death of cinema. Can any other discipline characterize its history as rising on the decline of its object? D. N. Rodowick1
I proposed this thesis project at a time of transition and change in (my) three fields of activity: film studies, film education and film production.
For a good decade now, film studies has been redefining itself as a discipline, mostly due to the influence of cultural studies. The first chapter is dedicated to these changes, which serves as the mise-en-context for my project and for doing research- creation as a PhD thesis (Chapter 2 is dedicated to this).
Film education constantly stays under pressure from university administrations that don't seem to understand or accept the high cost of production technology-based programs, and the need to keep classes small so that instructors can workshop the students' creative output. Neither do they seem to understand the need to invest both in new technology (now High Definition Video and Blue-Ray discs) while keeping the old: flatbed editing machines, a film lab, optical printers and especially a collection of
(16mm) film prints to show in classes. These collections are currently most at risk and have already been discarded in many places. With books there seems to be more awareness that even if the text is dated, the book still has value as a research tool for the history of that particular field. Film is not automatically granted a similar 'new' status as
1 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007), 29.
1 an archival treasure or tool to keep a memory of how moving images were made: it is simply dismissed as unimportant because 'outmoded'.
All this goes hand in hand with some radical changes that took place in film production, especially for the small independent filmmaker. The 'new-is-always-better' business strategy overpowers (and avoids) any possible critique on the new digital technology and very successfully promoted it to producers great and small. In practice, the effects are clear: there are fewer and fewer tools available to work with small film formats, and even 35mm is under siege as a format for the production and distribution of moving images; Kodak has stopped the production of Super-8 film; it is almost impossible to get optical sound tracks made for a final print of your work on 16mm; there are fewer and fewer labs that develop and print 16mm film; and the craftspeople who have all the technical wisdom about the medium film are retiring without passing on their knowledge and skills to younger generations. Moreover, fewer and fewer schools teach how to make films with film anymore. In the big picture, analogue film as a medium, and its craft, is fading.2 And with it, the essence of film, that which makes film 'film', and which cannot be replaced by video, no matter how good the quality of video, also disappears.3 To be able to tell young film students and filmmakers about the particular
In photography, the transition from analogue to digital was much more radical and photography with negatives was already classified as an 'historical' process some years ago. Robert Burley has been photographing this "disappearance of darkness" by making large format photographic records of all the Kodak plants that have been imploded all over the world and other related processes such as abandoned dark rooms, discarded photo formats such as Polaroid etc.... See http://www.robertburley.com 31 am aware of the controversies around 'media specificity'. I am convinced though that film, video and digital imaging have a variable distinctiveness, that they have both overlapping as well as different qualities. My argument here is a reaction against the all too easy promotion of digital technology as the same as film but better. It is not the same.
2 quality of film and to have them experience this, even if they will only see and make
video for the rest of their lives, is as essential as to teach them what a book is and how to
use a real encyclopaedia from before the Internet and Wikipedia existed.
This is where artists can play an important role: to keep the memory of film alive,
to give film a chance to be revived and to live on as film. Experimental filmmaking and
found-footage films in particular have been flourishing in the past decade, both
embracing and resisting digital technology, and diversifying into different media, styles
and venues. More and more these films, videos and installations are becoming stories
about the 'otherness' of film, meta-discourses about the disappearing medium film and its
specific qualities.4 Some artists are even helping film's demise by burning images in
one-time-only performances,5 permanently erasing film frames in front of an audience as
some form of dark magic. My own work has also always been and continues to be about
capturing the "hallucinatory quality" of cinema,6 be it more in the tradition of white
magic, and this was for me always closely tied to the specific qualities of film, its
embraceable 'otherness'. At the core of my research here, forced by the fast demise of
celluloid, is the question of whether the poetic quality of film can be preserved when
transferred to digital video, and if so how? And in the case this is not possible - if the
Now film most probably will become more and more a hybrid medium, with or without consent of filmmakers. 4 See also Charles R. Acland Residual Media. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvii: "Although versions of compilation films have been around at least since Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub's reconstruction films of the 1920s, more recent found-footage films are notable for the way they explicitly announce their historicity." 5 See the work of Montreal artist Karl Lemieux (e.g. Western Sunburn, 2007) or the film performances of Vancouver artist Alex MacKenzie (e.g. View/Sky/Rail, 2009). 6 Robert Ray talks about this "untranslatable essence of cinema" and how to penetrate cinema's veil while retaining its hallucinatory quality as a method in: Robert B. Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
3 photographic image is 'ruined' by converting it to digital video7 - then how can one call attention to that loss of the 'filmic'? Is there even a way to recreate it, or to memorialize this loss? Perhaps by overplaying the side-effects created by the transfer to video? Could this in turn evoke a 'new' hallucinatory quality?
This quest obviously (and luckily) quickly went beyond film's abstract qualities, simply because digital media have also profoundly influenced how we perceive reality.
They allow for infinite manipulation, and by doing so they also enhance the idea that film has not just a purity (an 'auratic' quality), but also a direct link with reality that video has not. This is a different function that shifts with every new technological step in the direction of video. As Catherine Russell argues:
In 1935 Walter Benjamin [already] argued that "mechanical reproduction", specifically the arts of film and photography, had altered the status and role of art as a social and cultural form. Video and digital media constitute yet another turn in that process, rendering film itself as a kind of historical horizon.8
Indeed, with the accelerating introduction of new digital technology in cinema, and especially with the introduction of high-definition video, film as a medium is no longer the touchstone for the next step to approach a similar quality in video. It has become a touchstone for what once was the best quality in moving images and what we left behind us in search of an ever higher resolution for the moving image. Film (celluloid) is quickly becoming a historical process, a museum medium. Focusing on this new function of film as a 'historical horizon' is where I started from for the creative part of this thesis. The series of found-footage films presented here represent how film more and more often
Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 10. 8 Ibid., 7.
4 points to its own history, becomes its own living memory, as well as a cultural memory. I
used the found images of documentaries, educational and industrial films, as well as
home movies, as tools to understand our contemporary culture, especially our
contradictory attitude with moving images as both obsessed and careless.
From the varied nature of the images selected, some recent and mainstream,
others rather obscure and historical, some even damaged, two story lines about 'the death
of film' emerged: the story of the decay of cinema (Chapter 3), and the story of decayed
film as art (Chapter 4). Although very different in style, both narratives rely heavily on
the idea that film informs us about who we are, that it tells us how we philosophically and
aesthetically deal with culture, and the idea that old and new culture are one continuum
(in practice that is exemplified here by working with film in digital video). The entire
film series included in this project is also based on my belief that subversive uses of
dominant culture go hand in hand with celebrative uses of marginalized culture: both
provide opportunities to create an alternative and diversified historiography (here a
memory of resistance for film). It is equally important to resist teleological forms of
thinking about (media-) history, which I tried to accomplish by avoiding conventional
narratives and easy plots. The decision to make a series of found-footage films, and not just one film, was made with hopes that this would enforce the idea that there are always
multiple angles, styles and stories at play. This is reinforced by the fact that working with
found images inherently brings to the forefront that there is no such thing as a unified culture or history, or a transparent meaning. Found-footage forces both the filmmaker and the audience to accept the ambiguity of images—their capacity to have multiple meanings—especially when used out of context, in fragments, or even in ruins:
5 Found-footage filmmaking, otherwise known as collage, montage, or archival practice, is an aesthetic of ruins. Its intertextuality is always also an allegory of history, a montage of memory traces, by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval, and recycling. The complex relation to the real that unfolds in found-footage filmmaking lies somewhere between documentary and fictional modes of representation, opening up a very different means of representing culture, (my emphasis)
Found-footage films are a form of creatively rethinking history as a cultural afterimage, like stating an afterthought or evoking a visual memory. The body of work I made as part of this thesis is meant as such a creative investigation into the possibilities of an afterlife for film in the digital age, with filmic afterimages and theoretical afterthoughts.
This particular research-creation project is the natural continuation of a process I started long ago, combining a strong interest in film history with experimental filmmaking and experimental film studies. For the experimental film part (limiting myself to only three) I need to acknowledge the important influence of Arthur Lipsett10,
Bruce Conner, and in particular Gustav Deutsch's film Film 1st (1-6) (1998) and (7-12)
(2002). For the experimental film studies part of this project, I took a lead from cultural studies scholar Robert Ray, who tried an alternative way of thinking and writing about film in his 1995 book The Avant-Garde finds Andy Hardy. His work is of particular interest to me because he developed his method from avant-garde art practices, what he
Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 238. 10 As part of the research for this project, and encouraged by the lack of recognition by current culture jammers of the history of this kind of filmmaking, in October 2007 I curated a film program for the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative titled Lipsett's Legacy: Recollecting Collage Films From the NFB and CFMDC. It was presented at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. I presented the program a second time for the Available Light Collective in October 2009 at Saw Gallery in Ottawa. The catalogue (which I wrote) is available from Image Arts Press: Gerda J. Cammaer, Lipsett's Legacy: Recollecting Collage Films from the NFB and CFMDC. Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Lipsett's Legacy: Recollecting Collage Films From the NFB and CFMDC". Halifax: Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, 2007
6 calls "the humanities equivalent of science's pure research":'' this seemed a particularly useful framework for a PhD thesis that is a research-creation project, in itself obviously an innovative intervention to breathe new life into the discipline (see Chapter 2). Ray tried to invent new forms of research that imitate the cognitive practices encouraged by photography and cinema itself. To do so, Ray draws in particular on the Surrealist uses of chance, anecdotes, fragments and collage. As explained above, the latter are also central techniques in my film work, and Surrealist art in general has always had a strong attraction for me,12 because:
Surrealism negates everything implied by the divisions and prohibitions on which the majority cultural structure is founded: negating ready-made 'orders', denying the pertinence of codes (social, but also stylistic, linguistic, and even logical). Surrealists therefore suspect everything that organizes the sense of things, the direction of things, in space and time, especially any kind of taxonomy and any presentation of evidence that has significance for us.'
Ray follows the Surrealist way of doing things to stress that there is a need to start approaching things differently, and as an example he writes several possible introductions to his book and effectively proves that (t)his tactic makes you think differently than when an author develops only one line of thought. I will not imitate Ray and write several introductions to my thesis, but later in Chapter 3 my text lingers and meanders as a multilayered complex film narrative, resisting the clear linear structure of academic
11 Robert B. Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, 10. 12 This is an inheritance of my Belgian upbringing. Throughout the thesis there are examples from and references to Belgian work. Some of the footage used for the films is also part of this 'trip down memory lane' (to cite my favourite Arthur Lipsett film). 13 Jacqueline Chenieux-Gendron, Surrealism. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1990), 5.
7 writing to write the messy story and history of the multiple tales (including some urban myths) about 'the death of film'.
This is at the centre of this entire project: how 'the death of film' as the transition to (or combination with) digital video takes effect and the consequences for film studies and film production alike, studied from the sideline by a concerned film educator and small independent filmmaker who tries to resist the simplicity and matter-of-factness with which this transition is presented. Even if I tried, the 'death of film' neither became a clear tale of cause and effect, nor even a given. Only one thing was certain: the recent take-over by digital technology in cinema has been quick and forceful, and from what it seems, permanent. From the first successful trials of digital cameras with a resolution approximating that of 35mm film and the gradual but definite replacement of the mechanical Steenbecks and Moviola editing tables by digital non-linear systems in the late 1980s, to digital sound (1990), (realistic) digital animation (1993), digital projection
(1999) and digital distribution (2000),14 into the 2000s we saw an almost complete disappearance of celluloid film stock as a recording, distribution and exhibition
14 This timeline is based on D. N. Rodowick's list of "digital events", in which he links these facts to significant films and productions such as the emergence of Steven Jobs's Pixar in the 1980s;, The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991) as the first films to use a convincing digitally animated character in a live-action film;, Dick Tracy (1990) and Edward Scissorhands (1990) had for their use of digital sound tracks;, Jurrasic Park (1993) as the first film with photographically '"believable"' synthesized images (my emphasis);, Toy Story (1995) as the first synthetic feature film;, Festen (1998) and Time Code (2000) as two fiction films entirely shot with digital cameras;, Pleasant Ville (1998) and O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) as two films with digitized negatives for treatment in postproduction (and by 2004 digital intermediates were standard practice);, Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace (1999) as the first film to be projected fully electronically and digitally;, and Titan A. E. (2000) was as the first feature film to be transmitted over the Internet to be projected digitally. Source: Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 8-9.
8 medium. This escalation of digital events can be seen as an example of what Marc
Auge called 'supermodernity' in the world of film.16 As Charles Acland describes, Auge qualifies this as:
The excess of documentation and the rapid dissemination of events, lending a heightened visibility to what are taken as instances of historical consequence and placing the most fleeting mundane incidents alongside revolutions...Events that are meaningful to vast populations escalate in number. The result [Auge] reasons is the acceleration of history, which poses special problems for historians for whom an "excess of time" makes the demand for general coherence of historical narrative and interpretation a near impossibility.17 (my emphasis)
Dealing with the changes in film over only the past five years, was a true exercise in dealing with the 'excess of time' and the acceleration of (film) history. It was a constant struggle trying to keep up and not get overwhelmed by the constant information overload, which I tried to do through writing, transferring images, editing and composing films, experimenting with historical and contemporary images and narratives. This process was not always successful, exactly because the growing 'excess of time' went hand in hand with a growing excess of images and tools: the more digital technology took ground and the more I gained access18 and control, the more people seemed encouraged to dump
15 The only field where there was a huge increase in sales of film stock is for the archiving of moving images. Those who have the money (read: big Hollywood studios) are transferring their 'assets' to 35mm, so far the most stable image carrier for the long term. (Michel Golitzinsky [Sales Manager Post-Production for Kodak Canada]. Untitled Conference Paper. Presented at the "Is Film Dead?" conference, Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, Halifax, March 23rd, 2007. Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. (New York: Verso, 1995), 26. Cited in Charles Acland, Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv. 17 Charles Acland, Residual Media, Ibid., xv. 181 owe a great deal to the film lab of the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University and in particular to Suzanne Naughton who helped me digitize the moving images. I am
9 16mm films.19 Confronted with this ever faster growing pictorial past and its sudden availability, I had to accept both the anachronistic character of my endeavours - always after the fact it seemed, hence the term 'afterthought' in the title - as well as the above- mentioned impossibility to achieve a coherent historical narrative and interpretation of the events, let alone a complete one. I also had to face my constant fear to 'forget' parts and to be out of the (film) loop, the fear that my work was outmoded before I even made it. When I had a writer's block (I never had a filmmaker's block) it was often because of this burning question: is my work contemporary, as in contemporary with current events, ideas and technology? This was a recurrent impasse that considerably slowed down my thought process, until I discovered an essay by Giorgio Agamben that helped me to see I was simply asking the wrong question. For Agamben it is more important to be a contemporary of the texts (and by extension the images) that we work with, and that with respect to the present, contemporariness is best situated as a disconnection, an 'out-of- joint-ness':
Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant. But precisely through this
also indebted to the photographic images lab of Wayne Pittendreigh, where I was able to make high quality scans of individual film frames and film strips (see annex). 19 In the summer of 2008 I saved a collection of forty-four 16mm film copies that were dumped by the North York Public Library in Toronto. It includes original copies of work by Arthur Lipsett, Roman Polanski, Robert Flaherty and many others, as well as multiple documentaries and educational films. I decided not to touch this collection and make the thesis with the collection of films I already had at the time I proposed this project (mostly films collected one by one from dumps and pawnshops). If not, I could easily have been making films into the 2020s. Besides this abundance of dumped films, the availability of films and film technology on sites such as Craigslist, eBay or through online film archives is haunting. Moreover, the growing antiquary quality of film is also obvious from ads promoting cocktail trays made with film cans, or handbags made of recycled Bollywood film prints (see photo in annex).
10 disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.
This idea also strengthened my choice to resist the current tendency to produce installation work for visual arts environments, which are now heavily promoted as the sites to carry cinema's history forward.21 Sure, displacing cinematic texts and techniques into art galleries is an exciting new outlet for film art and art with film, but I resist the tendency to promote this as the only way to work with film as an analogue medium, because then we are de facto helping to reduce the footprint of film in the world beyond art galleries, and in effect enhancing the 'antiquarious' state of film, restricting film to its life as a museum piece (see Conclusion). I argue that there is a need to keep seeing and making (experimental) film in its natural state, as a linear time piece, even if we can no longer see it in its original form (celluloid) or natural habitat: the cinema. This is why I decided to carry forward the history of film in the tradition of film and made several linear pieces that should tell you something about the state of the art and the state of the
Agamben, Giorgio Agamben, "What is the Contemporary?" In What is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40.
21 See for example the work of Mark Lewis, a Canadian artist who is interested in the decline of objects, be it public monuments or cinema. He is an often-cited artist in discussions about 'the end of cinema' and 'the death of film'. As he states himself: "Perhaps with the shift of cinema onto the historical stage, artists can now treat it like an object rather than a phenomenon. [...] I think art in this context is a secondary invention performed upon another invention, which is already a bit dusty." Mark Lewis "A Sense of Disbelief' (Interview with Charles Esche), cited in Stefan Jovanovich, "The Ending(s) of Cinema: Notes on the Recurrent Demise of the Seventh Art." OffScreen 7, no. 4 (April 2003), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/death_cinema.html (accessed October 3, 2004), 6.
11 medium, told as short stories that explore the formal qualities of the film medium and
alternative narrative structures.
Besides the above fear to be out of the loop, two other major issues made this
research-creation thesis a challenging endeavour. Firstly, there was the constant presence
of morbid themes, such as all the references to death, traces and ruins. I tried to avoid
creating an overly negative or depressing project by seeing the rich imagery these
metaphors carry and working with this in ironic ways more than by over-dramatizing the
theme of death (for example by making direct links with our own mortality and aging
processes). I also constantly reminded myself that it is useful to expose what others don't
want to see. That is why I set out to emphasize the dark sides of the current technological
changes in the first place: to resist the overly optimistic flashy discourses about digital
technology with which the industry blinds us. As Agamben has noticed, what the
contemporary - whom he also qualifies as a poet - actually sees is usually darkness,
rather than light:
The contemporary is (s)he who firmly holds his gaze on his (her) own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present...The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity.22 (my gender emphasis).
A different, but equally difficult, challenge in this exercise was to avoid becoming
nostalgic, or to glorify analogue film and hand-crafted film production techniques, and not to acknowledge that I am part of the digital age. I belong to the digital age as a film
Agamben, "What is the Contemporary?", 45.
12 teacher, film scholar and as a filmmaker, and I recognize that the new technology has opened many possibilities for the small independent filmmaker. I therefore set out to prove that a sincere concern about the survival of 16mm film and its history can go hand in hand with embracing digital technology. Moreover, I turned my 'nostalgia' for the good old days of 16mm into something positive, similar to how Stuart Tannock treats nostalgia:
Instead of treating nostalgia with suspicion, he sees in it a productive, contemporary structure of feeling, one that "invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient present world" and one that does not necessarily express conservative longing.. .Tannock emphasizes the search for historical continuity lodged in nostalgic gestures, and he suggests that such expressions work to identify historical rupture.
In other words, if I at times struggled to be a good contemporary as cultural critic, I tremendously enjoyed being a contemporary at work (paraphrasing Agamben) by
"reading history in unforeseen ways, to cite it according to a necessity that did not arise from [my] will, but from an exigency to which I cannot not respond" (the current historical rupture). 24 I did so with nostalgic gestures such as placing and splicing all the displaced found film images: displaced into a new medium (digital video), displaced in time (dating between 1950 and 2000), and displaced in new contexts, at times far remote from their original content and meaning, resituated in new times and new time-lines, digital ones. I thus was happily (re-)discovering what Benjamin already had stated: that
"the historical index contained in the images of the past indicates that these images may achieve legibility only in a determined moment of their history."25 I often had the feeling
Acland, Residual Media, xv. Agamben, "What is the Contemporary?", 52-53. Agamben, Ibid., 53.
13 that I had the honour to discover this freshly gained legibility of the images, and that I was contributing in a creative way to show how, at the same time that film is becoming history, the history o/film and the history contained in film gains importance.
In this way, my project also resonates with the renewed interest in historiography and film history in particular, a field that has gotten a jolt from the recent acceleration of history. Confronted with the maelstrom of the 'digital revolution' - which by the way also brought the field an unseen, infinite, and varied collection of historical material to study on DVD and on the Internet (a film archive and magazine like no other) - many recalled other moments of technological shifts in the history of the medium, including its very beginnings, emphasizing that there have been many moments of great uncertainty about the future of film in the past. This recurrent need to go back and look at the past, including mine, against the general 'Zeitgeist' of our progress-minded and over-mediated era, can be explained because of the urgency that defines this period: this time something bigger is going on. As Acland suggests:
Beyond an obsession with the 'new' as it elbows its way alongside the ever-expanding 'old', the material conditions within which we live with the past have changed. The fact that things and practices hang around long past their supposed use-by date confounds conventional ideas of historical progress, including how we make room for the new.26
Like many other scholars, Acland refers to the work of Harold Innis (and the renewed interest in his work). Innis worried about the present-mindedness of space-biased media and how tilting toward special control is a characteristic of the growth of empires.
Therefore, as Strate describes:
Acland, Residual Media, xvi. Acland, Residual Media, xvi.
14 Harold Innis argued for the importance of communication over time, which he felt was too often overlooked in modern societies, which he characterized as space biased. By this, he meant that we have been obsessed with the speed of communication, the instantaneous transmission of information made possible by electronic media and telecommunications technologies. We have focused our attention on communicating over distance, resulting in what McLuhan called the "global village". And we have concentrated on the sense of power and control that these new capabilities afford us. We have come to value whatever is newest, to expect novelty and cry 'boring' whenever the steady stream of stimulation lets up; we have become impatient with the minutest delays, and have come to expect a rapid turnover of content in all of our media. In the process, we have neglected, ignored, and even denigrated tradition, history, preservation and conservation. We have become present-minded, and lost sight of the fact that the present ought to be understood as a medium for maintaining continuity between the past and the future. Innis's "plea for time" was a plea for restoring balance to our space-biased 28 societies.
I have the impression that in film studies and film history, Innis's plea is rediscovered and honoured, now that film itself is becoming a historical medium, besides being a medium with a particular history and one that contains history. As Strate states, whereas
McLuhan stated that "the medium is the message" maybe now it is time to add that "the medium is the memory: this means that the very nature of our collective memory changes as the media we use to preserve information, and communicate over time, change."
My work was conceived to encourage a renewed interest in the medium film as part of our collective memory, at a time when the way we communicate and preserve moving images is changing tremendously. Therefore, I created this collaged memory of resistance for film with evidence from various texts and with discarded films selected for
Lance Strate, "The Medium is the Memory." In Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan. Essays: Archives as Medium. (Ottawa: Library and Archives of Canada, 2007): http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/030003- 4060-e.html (accessed 12 August, 2009, 1. 29 Lance Strate, Ibid., 2.
15 their potential to help show the complexity of the changes at hand. With this work, I hope to have offered a glimpse into a possible afterlife for film, retrieving, saving and reviving what otherwise might fall through the cracks of film history and be permanently swallowed by our society's cultural amnesia: orphaned 16mm films and manual film practices. This is my small contribution to trace and retrace some endangered film history, knowing that "memory is the most faithful of films"30 and that "history is on our
T 1 heels, following us like our shadows, like death."
1A Andre Bazin, "What is Cinema?" Cited in D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 73. Marc Auge, cited in Charles Acland, Residual Media, xv.
16 CHAPTER 1: RETHINKING FILM STUDIES (Mise-en-Contexte)
"These are the days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All decisive blows are struck left-handed." (Walter Benjamin)1
1.1 Introduction
It occurs to me that film studies, the academic field specialized in studying 'the'
medium of the twentieth century, suffered more than any other from millennium dread.
Since the 1990s, the discipline has kept questioning itself: it is under constant revision,
and there are several new tendencies at work. Film theory/history/studies books like
Reinventing Film Studies (Gledhill and Williams, 2000) attest to this process.2 There was
a pressing need to reframe and depart from the concerns that defined film studies in the
1970s and 1980s, and this both for film theory and film history. There was no longer
room for the kind of overreaching, grand theory that flourished in the 1970s (the
beginning of film studies as an academic discipline) mostly because film studies could no
longer ignore its interdisciplinary location. Recently added to these theoretical concerns,
is a growing anxiety about the field losing its object of study. Film studies can no longer
ignore the technological shift from film (celluloid) to digital media and multi-media. So,
while outsiders recognize film studies as an established academic discipline, insiders not
only have to deal with how the field keeps redefining itself in view of theoretical and
cultural shifts but also have to face the most unnerving question of all: is there a future
for film studies after 'the death of film'?
1 Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street" in Selected Writings: Volume 1: 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press), 1996,447. 2 Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.
17 Among the changes in the field of film studies, an interesting shift is the return to aesthetic concerns in film theory. In the 1970s, film theory was concerned with meaning in film often with the aim of bringing to the surface those aspects of meaning that are considered to be ideological. In other words, film theory had a significant political dimension, which had its origins in the radicalism of 1968. This shift in focus away from aesthetic concerns was a way to align film studies with the grand structuralist project to understand human culture as a whole in terms of patterns of meaning. But as Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith states:
The move in the direction of semiotics in the 1970s was, at least in part, a reaction against the kind of aesthetics that dealt with concepts that were 'indeterminate' and could not be brought within a rational schema. But the need for such a rational schema has become questionable. Too many of the things that films do evade attempts to subsume them under the heading of meaning. This is not to say there is no place for historical poetics or for the semiotics of culture in film study. Clearly, there is. But it is also time to consider a return to theories of the aesthetic so thoughtlessly cast aside a quarter of a century ago.3
Besides a return to aesthetics, another important change is that there is (finally) recognition for the claim that the reflective effort of critical thinking may 'hold-up' production and tends to obstruct creativity. Although theory is a great asset in any considered art practice, too much theory can kill creativity. Moreover, film theories could and should "involve more awareness and even celebration of the creative processes of production."4 It is a challenge to strike the right balance between theory and practice, and not let one hijack or ignore the other. Little has been written so far about the relationship
3 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "How Films Mean, or, from Aesthetics to Semiotics and Half- Way Back Again," in Reinventing Film Studies, 17. 4 Gill Branston, "Why Theory?" in Reinventing Film Studies, 22.
18 between theory and practice, and the creative practices that are the basis of both, especially in film. With the new acceptance in the humanities of research-creation projects (e.g. the new SSHRC grants and the first PhD students graduating with research- creation projects), there is more room to acknowledge and appreciate creative projects as academic research and theoretical works that incorporate an awareness of the creative practices of filmmaking and creative writing.
Thirdly, even though many issues remain uncertain, there is consensus that theorizing about cinema must be concretely located and historicized. According to
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, "theory, like cinema itself, thus comes to be seen as a socially constructed, historical category, serving socially significant and therefore politicized ends."5 Film theory no longer has a philosophical essence, but rather various debatable historical legacies. To 'historicise' is at the core of most recent attempts to rethink film studies, not just to rethink film theory,6 but also to rethink film history itself.
In tune with some of the new approaches in film studies these three principles, a concretely localized and historicized theoretical framework, a return to aesthetic concerns and a celebration of creative practices, constitute the foundation of my thesis project. By way of introduction (and only as an example) I have contrasted two possible ways to start rethinking film studies, the first one by rewriting the history of the field (Bill Nichols) and the second one, by reinventing the writing about film (Robert Ray).7 The latter is a reaction against the anthology titled Reinventing Film Studies (2000) in which Nichols's
5 Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, "Really Useful Theory" in Reinventing Film Studies, 5. 6 A good recent example is the reader: Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds. Inventing Film Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 7 Bill Nichols, "Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives," in Reinventing Film Studies, 34; and Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy.
19 text was published, and which in itself was an important attempt to challenge accepted thinking about film and to reinvent film studies for a 'post film era'. While the usefulness of this anthology for film studies cannot be overstated, I chose to follow Ray's critique of the work, because it opens up many creative possibilities. It is worth noting that, despite
Ray's challenging of the overreaching title for the anthology, 'reinventing film studies' gradually became one of the catch phrases for my project. Similarly 'the death of film' is an exaggeration I keep using for dramatic purposes. In the end, I don't believe either one is an accurate description of the changes we see in film and in film studies, but they are interesting propositions for a creative research project.
1.2 Film Theory Past
As Bill Nichols rightfully states, past theory is too vital and formative of present efforts to dismiss it simply as over and done with. There is virtue in recounting the story of film theory's past, since "within this nexus of previous thought and debate we locate ourselves and orientate our own work toward a future in part determined by the nature and the quality of our engagement with the past."8 Nichols offers a concise overview of pre-existing theories or prevailing methods that had sufficient explanatory power to account for most of cinema and thus became important 'conceptual frames' within film studies.
Bill Nichols, "Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives" in Reinventing Film Studies, 34.
20 A Marxist concept of culture as a realm of the symbolic production
linked to a society's economic mode of production and the perpetuation
of its existing, hierarchical relations.
A semiotic theory of sign systems that can grasp the organizational
subtleties of film form.
Formalist and neo-formalist notions of film structure as a semi-
autonomous domain with an internal history of development and a self-
contained system of signification.
A psychoanalytic theory of the subject whose use of sign systems is
always tied to issues of gender, desire and the unconscious.
A post-structural theory of narrative as a process of lending meaning to
the historical world by investing the historical world with those
meanings narrative form provides.
A phenomenology of film experience as a visceral, existential mode of
encounter irreducible to concepts and categories.9
In very simplified form, this overview of previous theorization can be seen as a series of possible answers to three deceptively simple questions: What is Cinema? How does it work? Why does it affect us?10 These three questions also drive both the written and the filmic part of this thesis, although the question of why film affects us is often reduced to why and how the death of film affects us.
9 Nichols, "Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives", 35.
21 According to Bill Nichols, in working one's way through past theory chronologically, film theory shares a pattern with modern literature and cultural studies that has three main 'moments'. The first moment of film theorizing aligned itself with the disciplines of literature and art history, adopting the same classic historicist assumptions, namely that:
The external, historical world is made available through factual sources - artefacts and documents - that would, once carefully assembled and examined, provide entry into the spirit, or Zeitgeist, of the times. This Zeitgeist, in turn, informed or coloured all cultural production. [In other words] the subjective work of art corresponds to the objective, historical world in ways that the attentive and diligent scholar could specify.''
The second moment for film theory occurs in the 1960s and 1970s, when formal methods gained prominence. This meant the decline of the social, sometimes Marxist, strain to early film theory, in favour of semiotics, auteur theory and psychoanalysis, all three methods that led to a clearly formalist turn in film studies. This coincided, not accidentally, with the rise of film studies as an academic discipline:
These methods also did for cinema what both romantic and formalist methods such as new criticism had done for literature: they redeemed cinema from the material and historical determinants of the market place. They legitimated its study as a liberal art or humanities, rather than as a social science, a discipline. These methods displaced film theory from the level of movies and their consequences to that of cinema and its qualities. They granted to cinema the (classic) status of art as a disinterested, non- practical form of engagement first formulated by Kant (1851) and perpetuated by formalist theories ever since. [In short] like formal literary theory and criticism, these approaches gave substantive weight to claims for a distinctive status to cinema as an object of academic study. Cinema became an art form whose distinct, formal properties nominated it for academic consideration alongside the other liberal arts: 'the seventh art'.12...Film might serve social or political ends but these ends provided
11 Nichols, "Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives", 35. 12 The Greeks recognized six 'superior' arts, or arts that rely on the 'higher' senses of sight and sound, namely: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, declamation (including literature) and dance (including drama or theatre). The first text known with a reference
22 less specificity and less promise of guaranteeing institutional (academic) scrutiny than the formal and artistic properties of the medium itself. Questions related to the place of film in history yielded to questions of the history offilmn (emphasis in original)
The third, contemporary, moment in film theory is inspired mostly by cultural studies.
It is a return to more social and historical methods of inquiry:
What has changed from the first moment is that the formal marks of distinction accorded to film, or literature, are no longer taken as subjective interpretations of a preexistent, objective reality. Film form is now seen as part and parcel of a larger, social process of constructing concepts and categories that are always relative to alternative constructs and always subject to historical transformation. Rather than a reality/representation, content/form, denotation/connotation, or norm/deviance model that accepts one set of terms and conditions as a given by which to measure others, this third, post-structural, moment acknowledges realities and norms but treats them as social constructions like any others...Idealist categories of holistic world-views, unitary Zeitgeists, and clear-cut periodizations fracture into more localized and materially based concepts such as gender, ethnicity and class. Each concept entails multiple viewpoints, contending perspectives and conflictual relations of hierarchy, power and hegemony.14
This is what Nichols refers to with his title "the revolt against master narratives" or the end of grand theories. This is at the core of postmodernist theory, which rejects that "any method or theory, discourse or genre, has a universal and general claim as the 'right' or
to the term "Fine Art" is a 1746 treatise by Charles Batteux, titled Les Beaux Arts reduits a un meme principe. In 1911 Ricciotto Canudo introduced the term "seventh art" for cinema and the term became quickly popular. Later it was suggested calling photography the eighth art, and comedy as the ninth. These new attempts, however, never became as popular as calling motion pictures "the seventh art". See: Ian Aitken, European film theory and cinema: a critical introduction. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 75. 13 Bill Nichols, op cit, 36. 14 Bill Nichols, op cit., 37.
23 the privileged form of authoritative knowledge." This fragmentation into more localized and materially-based concepts actually goes beyond gender, ethnicity and class. The former hierarchies between high and low art, translated into categories of films 'worth' studying and those that are not, have been demolished by the postmodern tendencies that are at work in all the arts.
Although the influence of cultural studies is widespread, it has not penetrated all areas of film studies the same way. Particularly in the field of experimental film, a certain bias in the teaching 'canon' remains. After the success of Michael Snow's Wavelength
(1967), a film that won the Age D'Or award at the famous EXPRMNTL 4 international experimental film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute (Belgium),16 there was a narrowing of the scope of experimental film. Although a tendency in accordance with the rest of film studies at that time (in Nichols's terminology the first moment of film theory), this was a move against the basic characteristics of this 'genre' of film that by definition should be the most liberal and inclusive. Critics and scholars began to favour 'structuralist' films over other more lyrical, personal, and especially more political styles of experimental film. Citing Duncan Reekie, William Wees points out that after 1970 the term
15 Laurel Richardson, "Writing: A Method of Inquiry." In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 3rd ed., 959- 978. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005, 517. 16 EXPRMNTL, also known as the Knokke Experimental Film Festival and Festival du Film Experimental de Knokke-le-Zoute was a Belgian avant-garde and experimental film festival. It succeeded the Brussels Experimental Film Festival (1947 and 1958) and was held under the EXPRMNTL moniker in 1963 (EXPRMNTL 3), 1967 (EXPRMNTL 4) and 1974 (EXPRMNTL 5). It was conceived and curated by cinephile and founder of the Belgian Cinematheque, Jacques Ledoux. The 1967 edition of the festival is famous for the "clash" between the French New Wave and other experimental film styles. See James Harding, "Knokke-Le-Zoute, EXPRMNTL 4 Film Festival, Belgium," http://www.luxonline.org.uk/historv/1960-1969/knokke experimental_film_festival.html (accessed November 20, 2009).
24 'underground' was resolutely dropped by the movement itself in favour of terms like
'avant-garde', 'experimental', and 'independent'.17 Referring to the growing support for these films from art councils and other institutions, Reekie states:
The shift in nomenclature was a component of a deeper ideological and institutional shift away from the popular anarchy of the counter-culture and towards the legitimacy of art and the state...What remained of the avant-garde and the independent film and video sector had become a closed circuit of state agencies, desperately under-funded workshops and an elite of established artists and production companies locked into mutual self-legitimation.18
This institutionalization of (certain) experimental film was enhanced by the growing attention of scholars for the genre often followed by, or following, the hiring of experimental filmmakers in the academy as teachers and scholars, which in turn also helped to legitimate the more 'intellectual' and abstract films of the avant-garde. Hence, today, although movements and styles have come and gone, and despite the influence from cultural studies that favours more personal and political work, there is still a tendency to promote more fomal experimental films in film studies.
I took the above overview of three key moments in film studies as described by
Bill Nichols, because it is a concise and helpful scheme to set up the context for this thesis project, but it should be noted that Nichols only sketches the general trends and that for each of the moments he distinguishes, one can find counter examples or other voices that did not follow the tendencies he describes. Moreover, if an overall influence of cultural studies can clearly be detected in recent developments in film studies, one should keep in mind that this field itself, probably more than any other discipline,
17 William C. Wees, "Whatever Happened to Underground Film?" Canadian Journal of Film Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring, 2009), 98. 18 Duncan Reekie as cited in Wees, Ibid., 98.
25 combines a variety of discourses from very distinct voices. The diversity of opinions
within cultural studies creates significant debate between the different streams. Hence, I
used Nichols's overview here as an introductory scheme for its (artificial) clarity, but it is
not necessarily the only or the best model to follow for a more in-depth rewriting of the
history of film studies as an academic discipline.
1.3 Reinventing Film Studies
An interesting example of a new approach in film studies, also inspired by the
cultural studies movement, is the work of Robert Ray. It is a good example of someone who is trying to be more creative when writing about film. He attempts to jump the tracks
of 'ordinary' academic discourse and to achieve a mode of written communication that is better attuned to the photographic and electronic age. For example, he uses playful techniques, which include lists, recipes, montages, manifestos, puns, and experiments in free association. In other words: he freely borrows strategies from the historical avant- garde and surrealism. To be precise, more than directly borrowing from Surrealist artists such as Andre Breton, his work is influenced by cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin, who have used surrealist methods in their own writing. As stated in the introduction of the book, Ray "wants to blur the distinction between art and criticism, and he sometimes aspires to a 'readymade' or a montage of quotations. In the tradition of the avant-garde, he favours detournement, remotivation, and the recycling of texts and styles".19
Ray is a major source of inspiration for my project, not just because his writing is creative and refreshing, but mostly because his choice of techniques and influences
19 James Naremore, "Foreword" in How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies by Robert B. Ray (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), xi.
26 corresponds with most of the work I write about and make: collage films with found- footage. Although his approach is creative, it is not original per se, even within the humanities. For example in her key text "Writing: A Method of Inquiry" Laurel
Richardson addresses how (academic) writing should be first and foremost a creative practice.20 She argues that by using, for example, metaphors, experimental writing techniques and by mixing genres it is possible to improve traditional (academic) texts because this method allows writers to relate more deeply to their materials than when following scholarly conventions. The main problem with the inherited model of academic writing is that it reifies a static social world and thus blocks the creativity and sensibilities of the individual researcher. As a remedy, Richardson suggests learning from reading work by creative writers,21 just as Ray got his manna from the surrealists and Walter
Benjamin.
In accordance with both Richardson's suggestions and recent tendencies in film studies, Ray demonstrates that cultural meaning is unstable, always dependent on its context, and constantly subject to appropriation and re-motivation. "He wants to move our attention from the authorized, presumably autonomous work of art to the process of textuality; in his own words, he wants us to think of the art object as 'a site, a crossroads traversed by communicative highways continually rerouted by external, extra-textual circumstances.'"22 Ray describes his approach as 'postmodern', but with James Naremore who wrote the foreword to Ray's book on How a Film Theory Got Lost (2001), I would
20 Richardson, "Writing: A Method of Inquiry", 959-978. 21 I recommend reading the work of Nicole Brossard, France Daigle and Virginia Woolf, three important literary examples for myself, as well as the filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Chris Marker, and obviously Walter Benjanin. 22 Naremore, "Foreword", xi.
27 argue against the use of this terminology because it inevitably caricatures the modernist
'other'. I agree with Naremore that "in most instances, modernism and postmodernism
are two sides of the same coin, opposed not so much to each other as to a certain kind of realism,"23 namely the nineteenth century tradition to tell a story from an objective or omniscient point of view. Both modern and postmodern literature explores subjectivism, using an external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, working with fragmentariness and playfulness as techniques for constructing the narrative.
For instance, Roland Barthes did this in S/Z (1970), where he opposed the
'readerly' (lisible) Balzac to the 'writerly' (scriptible) moderns. These terms mark the distinction between traditional literary works such as the classical novel, versus twentieth century works such as the new novel, which violate the conventions of realism and thus force the reader to produce a meaning (or meanings) which are inevitably 'other' than the
'authorized' one(s). For Barthes the 'readerly' text, like a commodity, disguises its status as a fiction, as a literary product, and presents itself as a transparent window on 'reality'.
The 'writerly' text, by contrast, self-consciously acknowledges its artifice by calling attention to the various rhetorical techniques that produce the illusion of realism. Writerly texts locate the reader as the site of the production of meaning: "the goal of literary work
(of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text."24 Barthes also explores how all telling modifies what is being told. In other words, that which linguistics calls 'the message' is in fact a parameter of its performance. What is told is always the telling. And this he does not criticize, but rather celebrates.
Naremore, "Foreword", xii. 24 Roland Barthes, S/Z, Translated by Richard Miller. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4.
28 Ray, who uses S/Z as a model for his own writings, also observes that Barthes's method, namely to explore one minor Balzac novella in detail to make an argument about narrative in general, has been eagerly used by academics as a new model for case-by-case analyses. Yet Barthes's point is exactly that you do not need to see this model worked out with other examples, since that will produce only more of the same. Because information is defined as a function of unpredictability, such work consequently contains very little information value.25 In other words, following Barthes and Benjamin's example, Ray's method can be simply defined as a refusal to follow any model and instead he lets his research and writing be guided by the accidental and the unexpected. According to Ray, these techniques took the back seat in film studies when in the early 1970s the discipline spread through the universities, and centred itself on the semiotic approach, which encompasses structuralist, ideological, psychoanalytic, and gender theory:
Committed largely to a species of critique defined by the Frankfurt School, this paradigm accomplished wonderful things, above all alerting us to popular culture's complicities with the most destructive, enslaving, and ignoble myths. It taught us to see the implications of those invisible operations that Brecht had called 'the apparatus,' the relation, for example, between Hollywood's continuity system, apparently only a set of filmmaking protocols, and a worldview eager to conceal the necessity of choice. These gains did not come free of charge. The Impressionist- Surrealist half of film theory fell into obscurity, banished for its political irrelevance. Indeed, 'impressionistic' became one of the new paradigm's most frequently evoked pejoratives, designating a theoretical position that was either 'untheorized' or too interested in the wrong questions. The wrong questions, however, frequently turned on reasons why people went to the movies in the first place, the problem so vital to the Impressionists.26
25 Robert Ray, "Introduction: Reinventing Film Studies" in The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, 6. 26 Robert Ray, "How a Film Theory Got Lost" in How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, 12.
29 Dudley Andrew confirms in his 2000 article "The Three Ages of Cinema Studies and the
Age to Come" that cinema studies after the 1970s slipped into standard adult roles in the system, swelling in numbers but no longer so defiantly different from other academic disciplines.27 Formerly experimental criticism, deemed irresponsible and suspect, was replaced by rationalist critiques. All this happened almost synchronously with the decline of the New-Wave films, a successful historical example of a hybrid of research and spectacle, two tendencies that actually had dominated film and film studies since the films of the Lumiere Brothers and George Melies. In a harsh critique of "The New Film
Studies and the Decline of Critique" Richard Rushton (who refers to Dudley Andrew) also connects the loss of "substantial critical engagement with the capacities of films" with the disappearance of alternative forms of cinema that to a great extent inspired and made the study of film as an academic discipline grow. He states:
I am not in any way advocating a return to the kinds of analysis championed by the apparatus and screen theories of the 1960s and 1970s; there is little question that such writing belongs to a different age of film studies. What I do want to rescue from that moment is a certain spirit with which such research was engaged, which is probably something like a determined fight for better films, a commitment to more delicate and committed engagements with cinema and, perhaps more than anything else, the search for a conceptualization of the role that a better cinema might play in the construction of a better society. To a certain extent, the loss of such a spirit is a result of the professionalization of film studies.28 (emphasis in original)
Dudley Andrew, "The "Three Ages" of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 115, no. 3 (2000): 341- 351. 28 Richard Rushton, "The New Film Studies and the Decline of Critique." CineAction 72, (Oct, 2007): 4. The theme of this issue was "The State of the Art: Film and Film Criticism Today".
30 This loss of a certain 'spirit' or simply a critical edge is not limited to film studies and film criticism, and neither is it a recent phenomena. Roland Barthes saw this happening to cultural criticism in general, and already in a 1977 essay titled "Change the
Object itself: Mythology Today" he recognized the devastating role that the semiotic paradigm, one that he had personally helped to establish, played in constraining the humanities:
It too has become in some sort mythical: any student can and does denounce the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois character of such and such a form (of life, of thought, of consumption). In other words, a mythological doxa has been created: denunciation, demystification (or demythification), has itself become discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic declaration.29
Robert Ray applies the term path-dependence to film studies in order to describe these constraints that Barthes saw operating in the humanities. For Ray, the key debate is how film studies can produce information, defined by information theory as a function of unpredictability. Simply stated, the more predictable a message, the less information it contains. He basically implies that by losing the Impressionist-Surrealist half of film theory, film studies began to produce texts that are less informative (because more predictable). He sees as main reason for the impasse in film studies the fact that film theory lost sight of cinema's automatism and of the concept of photogenie, Jean Epstein's description of what constitutes the "purest expression of cinema": that which defies any description in words.30 Epstein borrowed the term from his mentor and fellow cinephile
Louis Delluc. In his book Photogenie (1920) Delluc argued that the source of photogenie
29 Roland Barthes. "Change the Object Itself in Image, Music, Text. Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 166. 30 Jean Epstein, "For a New Avant-Garde" in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, edited by P.Adams Sitney. (New York University Press: New York, 1978), 29.
31 was located in the capacity of the moving image to transform mundane reality into "pure poetry" and infuse the picture on the screen with greater symbolic and emotional significance.31 Andre Bazin later stated this aspect of cinema in the following way: "for the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man" and for reasons that are difficult to define, the camera renders
"otherwise ordinary objects, landscapes, and even people luminous and spellbinding."32
The latter is an important part of the magic of cinema.
According to Ray, it was Eisensteia who insisted that filmmaking as an art depends on denying the camera's automatic recording capacity, and the success of his work (both theory and practice) contributed to the fast decline of the Impressionist-
Surrealist approach. Eisenstein saw the cinema as a means of argument, and his sensational films successfully enhanced the prestige and validity of this theoretical position. By contrast, the Impressionistic-Surrealist movement saw film as a vehicle of revelation. For them, film creates knowledge that is not always expressible with words.
Unfortunately, by insisting that film's essence lies beyond words, the photogenie movement left its would-be-followers with nowhere to go as far as developing a film theory is concerned. Moreover, their emphasis on fragmentation did not suit the rapidly consolidating commercial cinema at the time, whose hard-earned success lay precisely in its continuity system. In contrast, both the Impressionists and the Surrealists often regarded narrative as an obstacle to overcome, and Surrealist tactics for film viewing are exactly designed to reassert the autonomy and ambiguity of images, to startle the
Aitken. European Film Theory and Cinema, 82. Andre Bazin cited in Ray, "How a Film Theory Got Lost", 4.
32 audience rather than to make them suspend disbelief.33 To unlock film studies from its restrained position in theories that try to confirm the predictable and aspire to scientific clarity, following Ray, I suggest considering whether the rational, politically-sensitive,
Eisensteinian tradition can be reunited with the Impressionist-Surrealist interest in photogenie and automatism. In other words, how might we adopt the idea that film theory can imitate filmmaking and recognize that, at its best, cinema or the art of film requires a subtle mixture of logical structure and untranslatable enchantment? Methodologically this translates into the suggestion that film theory should learn how to write differently34 and perhaps even learn how to stage its research in the form of a spectacle, such as by making films.
1.4 Re-introducing the Experiment in Film Studies
Continuing his project to help rethink film studies, Ray wrote a critical review of the fore-mentioned volume Reinventing Film Studies. In this article he states that the goal of re-inventing film studies is not to 'historicize' - the implicit motto of the book - but to
"penetrating the movies' veil while retaining their hallucinatory quality. The project is to invent a method that will achieve this balance."35 Central to his project is the freedom and the will to experiment:
If we are going to figure out a way of writing about the movies that simultaneously deciphers their workings and reproduces their spell, one thing is certain: we will have to experiment. But that is one thing academic film studies has proved resolutely unwilling to do. Although post-196 8
33 Ray, "How a Film Theory Got Lost", 4. 34 Robert Ray is more specific and proposes to revive the Cahiers du Cinema-Nouvelle- Vague experiment. Ibid., 13. 35 Robert Ray, "Mystery Trains." Sight and Sound 10, no. 11 (November 1 2000), http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/69/: 3.
33 film theory has drawn repeatedly on such writers as Benjamin, Brecht, Barthes and Derrida, who relied on fragments, digressions, puns and chance, film academics have ignored those writer's experiments, citing texts such as Barthes' autobiography as if it were a conventional critical essay instead of a mixture of photographs, drawings and alphabetized fragments. In fact, Anglo-American film studies has rejected everything but the traditional essay, in effect repeating Georg Lukacs' mistaken insistence (made 70 years ago against Brecht) that only one kind of 'realistic' literature is possible.36
Ray explains this absence of experimentation in film studies as an example of path- dependence, a term he borrows from economics. The term refers to the dependence of economic outcomes on the path of previous outcomes, rather than simple reliance on current conditions. In a path-dependent process, history is not just one factor that matters among others: it has an enduring influence. One can see how choices made on the basis of transitory conditions persist long after those conditions change. Many of the most prominent path-dependent features of the economy are technical standards, such as the
'QWERTY' keyboard.37 One can start writing whole treatises about how 'old' images and functions that stem from analogue film practices survive in a digital world, while the new technology could have completely re-invented the icons and work methods, for example, editing in programs such as Final Cut Pro. Another example of simply mimicking analogue techniques in digital technology, is the addition of the click sound to digital photo cameras. Since these cameras have no mirror, there is no reason to have
36 Robert Ray, "Mystery Trains", 3. 37 The case of the QWERTY keyboard has been particularly controversial, and it is used a lot as an example in path-dependency theory. See the writings of Paul David, for example: Paul A. David, "Path Dependence and the Quest for Historical Economics: One More Chorus of the Ballad of QWERTY." University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History 20 (November 1997). http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/paper20/david3.pdf (accessed November 20, 2009).
34 them 'click', but path-dependency theory, which was originally developed by economists to explain technology adoption processes and industrial evolution, is a logic that demands that digital cameras must nonetheless click. These theoretical ideas had a strong influence on evolutionary economics. From here comparative politics and sociology have adapted the concept for comparative-historical analyses of the development and persistence of institutions, whether they are social, political, or cultural. Now most authors use path- dependence to mean that institutions are self-reinforcing and perpetuating. Film studies, because it is such a small field with a constant over-supply of PhDs, makes it especially prone to path-dependence: the temptation to reach for the most commonly available study template, instead of trying something different.
Proposing a possibility for something different, Ray cites Gregory Ulmer who in his book Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994) argued that creativity proceeds by emulation: to strive to equal or excel the existing work, especially through imitation and copying.38 According to Ulmer, manifestos are good ways to conceive new ways of doing and thinking and to make a new method or approach replicable by others. For him manifestos do more then just announce ideas, they actually contribute to the process of invention. Ulmer actually defines 'heuristics' as a branch of logic that deals with the art of discovery or invention. Following Ulmer, Ray concludes that avant-garde manifestos
38 Gregory L. Ulmer is a professor at the University of Florida (Gainesville), Department of English since 1985, and a Professor of Electronic Languages and Cybermedia at the European Graduate School (Switzerland), where he teaches an Intensive Summer Seminar. Ulmer is the author of Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video, (New York: Routledge, 1989); Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).In Heuretics, Ulmer sets forth new methods appropriate for conducting cultural studies research in an age of electronic hypermedia. See his personal website: http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue/
35 such as Andre Breton's 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism (should) belong to discourses on methodology in film studies.39
Based on manifestos written by different avant-gardes of the twentieth century,
Ulmer gave his own anti-method the acronym CATTt, which includes the following operations:
C = Contrast (opposition, inversion, differentiation) A = Analogy (figuration, displacement) T = Theory (repetition, literalization) T = Target (application, purpose) t = tale (secondary elaboration, representability)40
Ray applies this to Truffaut's famous 1954 article "A Certain Tendency of the French
Cinema,"41 which he qualifies as a successful attempt to try something different.42 Ray's extension of the CATTt rubric to Truffaut's work is as follows: 'Contrast = "the tradition of quality" (the formally conservative big budget French films controlled by scriptwriters rather than directors). Analogy = the literary notion of authorship. Theory = the romantic self-expression and Sartrean individual responsibility. The Target was the
French film industry at the time and the tale that hybrid of documentary and fiction,
For an on-line version of the Surrealist Manifesto see: Andre Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism." Surrealist.com: History of surrealism, surreal art, and the artists involved in the surrealist art movement, http://surrealist.com/Surrealist_Manifesto.aspx, (accessed 10 December, 2006). 40 Ulmer, Heuristics: The Logic of Invention, 8. Also cited in Ray, "Mystery Trains", 4, and Ray, "Reinventing Film Studies" in The Avant-Garde finds Andy Hardy, 44-48. 41 Francois Truffaut, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema." Cahiers Du Cinema 31,(1954) 42 Robert Ray also paraphrased Truffaut in an earlier book. In A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1985) he examines the ideology of the most enduring popular cinema in the world. After his study of 364 frame enlargements he concludes that, like the heroes in those films, American Filmmaking has avoided commitment, in both plot and technique. Instead of choosing left or right, avant-garde or tradition, Ray states that American Cinema tries to have it both ways.
36 which Jean-Luc Godard aptly labelled: "research in the form of spectacle".4 Ray wonders if maybe CATTt is the way to reinvent film studies and proposes as a start the following:
Contrast = The conventional academic essay Analogy = The Experimental Arts Theory = ? Target = the Anglo-American film Community (AA) tale = ?
To fill in the Theory slot, Ray mentions that he left this open because he uses several theories in his writing, but the guiding theory for him remains "a conductive logic, interrogative readings prompted by Barthes' famous 'third meaning' of cinematic details whose significance eludes ready formulation."44 Barthes developed this idea of 'le troisieme sens' - 'the third meaning' but also 'the third way'-in his celebrated 1970 essay on Eisenstein, an essay that is often read as announcing the end of Barthes' structuralist period. In this essay he continues with his fascination for details, which he calls fetishism, but this time it takes the form of a meditation on still images taken from films.45 This essay anticipates many of the ideas Barthes developed in Camera Lucida
43 Ray, "Mystery Trains", 4. 44 Ibid., 4. 45 It is worth noting that Barthes was not exactly a film lover or cinephile like most of his (French) contemporaries writing for Les Cahiers du Cinema. He actually mistrusted the hypnotic spell exerted by cinema and in "En Sortant du Cinema" he called the filmic image "a lure" ("En Sortant Du Cinema." Communications 23. (May 1975): 106). He disliked the "attention problem" in film, the fact that film's continuity makes it difficult for any film analyst to see (or separate) the 'signs'. He also wrote about his "resistance to the cinema" in an autobiographical book titled Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975) referring to his love for the fragment and the haiku: "without remission, a continuum of images; the film... follows, like a garrulous ribbon: statutory impossibility of the fragment, of the haiku." His article on the "third meaning" analyzing stills from Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, is a rare film text by Barthes where he comes close to studying an entire film as a series of fragments. In Camera Lucida, Barthes states that he
37 (1980), his only book entirely dedicated to photography (one that focuses on the connection between photography and death). One could almost replace the term 'third meaning' with the 'punctum' of Camera Lucida: according to Barthes, what establishes a direct relationship with the object or person in the image is a particular detail that touches
(literally 'pierces') the spectator. Walter Benjamin already pointed to something similar in "A Small History of Photography" (1931), which he called "the inconspicuous spot".
Benjamin remarked that:
No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back may rediscover it.47
It is a similar search that inspired some of the choices of found film images used for the films in this project: it was not a search as such, the images simply had that impact.
Others were chosen more for their value as 'studium', what Barthes compared to the
'punctum' as a more intellectual, cultural, linguistic and political reading of a photographic image. While the 'studium' is an exploration of the meaning in a photo, it explains why we like it, the 'punctum' is more a sudden uncanny recognition, a particular point of impact that is more accidental, personal and emotional: it is why we love an
actually decided that he likes photography "in opposition to the cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it." [Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 3.] It would be interesting to see if Barthes would see/appreciate film more now that digital technologies can freeze any frame at any time. 46 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. 47 Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography", in One-Way Street, and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. (London: NLB, 1979.), 246.
38 image. Discussing the third meaning, Barthes explains that "such emotion is never sticky, it is an emotion which simply designates what one loves, what one wants to defend: an emotion-value, an evaluation."48
Later Barthes's method of reading film stills and exploring their third meaning would launch the celebrated method of 'arret sur 1'image'. This is a concept further developed by the famous French film critic Serge Daney, a pun on the tern 'arret sur image', the French term for 'freeze-frame'.49 Barthes actually referred to the still images he studied as 'photogrammes.'50 Certain details in these images allow him to get what he calls 'the obtuse meaning' embedded in the film, that which cannot be explained by reference to plot, character, verisimilitude, rhetoric or style. Besides being similar to the
'punctum' in Camera Lucida, the obtuse meaning has the same function as what Barthes elsewhere called 'the writerly' - this infinite plurality of meanings - that arises out of the unique, the detail. This obtuse meaning constitutes what Barthes calls the "filmic", that
Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein Stills" in Image/Music/Text, 59. 49 Serge Daney (1944 - 1992) was an influential French movie critic who developed his personal theory of the image. Although highly regarded in French and European film criticism circles, his work remains little known to English-speaking audiences, largely because it has not been translated until recently. Daney developed this concept of "arret sur l'image" in an 1989 article for the journal La Recherche Photographique. In 2007 Berg Publishers issued Postcards from the Cinema, a collection of essays and interviews that finally introduced some of Serge Daney's work to North-American audiences. (Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema. Translated by Paul Douglas Grant. Oxford; New York: Berg, 2007). 50 Strictly seen (in English) a "photogramme" or "photogram" is a photographic image created without a camera by placing objects directly on photosensitive paper or film (see for example the work by Man Ray). A "film still" is usually used as a term for what Barthes described, namely a still image made by enlarging and printing one film frame. This is different from a "freeze-frame" (or "hold-frame", "stop-frame" or simply "freeze"), which is a single film frame that is printed repeatedly (with an optical printer) on a duplicate copy of the film so that the image projected on the screen seems frozen for a desired length of time.
39 which, as he says, "exceeds" communication and cannot be recuperated, explained, contained, by the language of film criticism."51 Hence, besides the fact that Barthes's
'third meaning' has obvious similarities with Delluc's and Epstein's photogenie, he also hints at a method on how to 'grasp' the 'ungraspable', namely by studying details, letting them show where the magic of film lingers and where it can take you.
It is important to acknowledge that this method is not new or untried. Walter
Benjamin already did this (as Ray also mentions), especially in his unfinished Arcades
Project (Passagenwerk).52 In this collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the nineteenth century, Benjamin is especially concerned with the covered outdoor 'arcades' that characterized the city's distinctive street life and 'flanerie' culture (the tale). This uncompleted Arcades Project is a montage of notes, found images and texts, citations from and reflections on hundreds of published sources, arranged in thirty-six alphabetical categories (convolutes) with descriptive rubrics such as 'Fashion', 'Boredom, Eternal
Return', 'The Collector', 'The Flaneur', 'Photography', 'Social Movements' and 'On the
Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress'. His central target (the second T in the
CATTt model) is the commodification of things, a process in which Benjamin situates the decisive shift to the modern age. His aim is to contrast traditional history writing and, analogous to the experimental arts, he has created a work that because of its methodological inventiveness is exemplary in showing how history writing can be reinvented for every topic and every occasion. His work was so novel at the time, that it
51 Phillip Watts, "Roland Barthes's Cold-War Cinema." SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 34, no. 3 [108], (2005): 23. 52 Benjamin Walter, The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
40 was not immediately recognized and appreciated as a valuable attempt to develop a new kind of theoretical writing. When Benjamin proposed his work and his method to the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (which by then had moved to New York) from which he had received funding to produce this work, his friend Theodor Adorno responded very negatively. He told Benjamin that his work was "located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory can break the spell."53 Later
Adorno revised his opinion and admitted that the work had its own merit. Indeed, to be at the crossroads of magic and positivism, is not a bad place to be at all, especially with regards to film (studies).
1.5 Building a Thesis Project
Benjamin's project is also a precursor of what Ray proposes as a method to write about film in general, a project that combines photogenie, third meanings and fetishism.
He proposes to start the study of (a) film by examining
the cinematic detail whose insistent appeal eludes precise explanation. Barthes maintained that third meanings, while resisting obvious connotations, compel 'an interrogative reading'. In doing so, he was implicitly suggesting how impressionistic reverie could prompt an active research method resembling the Surrealists 'Irrational Enlargement' a game in which players generate chains of associations from a given object.54
Besides basing one's research on cinematic details that can be studied in images, such as
Barthes did in his study of film stills, and then taking this as a start for a series of (free)
53 Adorno, Theodore Adorno, "Letters to Walter Benjamin". In Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Ernst Bloch. Translation edited by Ronald Taylor, (London: Verso, 1980), 129. 54 Ray, "How a Film Theory Got Lost", 13.
41 associations such as in the Surrealists' game of irrational enlargements,55 another interesting way to infuse the thinking about film with a fresh approach, is to study what
Gilles Deleuze calls 'irrational intervals', a cut between two separate moving images that is not motivated by movement or action. This type of interval can operate as a fissure or a tear within the moving image text (I assume also within texts about moving images56) through which the brain can pass into the arena of the not-yet-thought, away from the rational interval of film as text and text as film. As Rodowick describes, this irrational interval opens possibilities to effect a memory of resistance:
The irrational interval does not signify or represent; it resists. And it restores a belief in the virtual as a site where choice has yet to be determined, a reservoir of un-thought yet immanent possibilities and modes of existence. In this respect, the Utopian aspect of philosophy and art is the perpetuation of a memory of resistance. This is a resistance to habitual repetition-a time that is calculated, rationalized, and reified. But it is also resistance to all forms of commerce and exchange, whether in the form of communication or that of commodities.57
I see the work of Robert Ray as a serious attempt at perpetuating a memory of resistance for film studies. His return to the practices of the Impressionists and the Surrealists is a possible search to give un-thought yet immanent possibilities a chance again, resisting the classic form of essay writing and other standard practices in the (Anglo-American) film community. But his attempt is just one of many possibilities. I want to recall that there is a long tradition in experimental film to call into question the dominant paradigm of
55 In the Surrealist game of irrational enlargements they looked at a randomly chosen tiny details of a film trying to discover all the secrets of the medium hidden in it through free association, and by extension the workings of western culture. 56 This is what makes reading Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema (for me) both very exiting and very difficult, as it seems that his texts offer many more opportunities for the brain to slip into areas of the non-thought. 57 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Post-Contemporary Interventions. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 204.
42 cinema, and that many experimental films can be considered 'memories of resistance'.
According to William Wees, the 'genre' of found-footage films is uniquely able to pose
these questions:
Whatever the filmmaker may do to them [the found images] - including nothing more than reproduce them exactly as he or she found them - recycled images call attention to themselves as images, as products of the image-producing industries of film and television, and therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of information, entertainment, and persuasion that constitute the media-saturated environment of modem - or many would say postmodern - life. By reminding us that we are seeing images produced and disseminated by the media, found footage films open the door to a critical examination of the methods and motives underlying the media's use of images.58
Forme the concepts of the irrational interval and the memory of resistance, are important
as a framework for this research-creation thesis. Finding an alternative for film studies
serves as a context, but this thesis is mostly about voicing resistance against all the uncritical thinking about digital technology as a replacement for film. I want to contribute to a more nuanced image of recent developments in film technology and film culture. I do this by calling attention to the importance of filmic waste and recycling, and the need to do things differently: we need a different film culture and an alternative image ecology.
At this time, I can offer a first glimpse at the overall structure my project. I therefore use the CATTt model since it helps to clarify things but, as will gradually become clear, the complexity of the entire project quickly outgrew this structure. For now it is a good tool to draw the major contours of my thesis, which according to CATTt are:
Contrast = conventional PhD Thesis
58 William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. (New York City: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 32.
43 Analogy = the Experimental Arts Theory = Deleuze, Barthes and Benjamin Target = the commodification and commercialization of film tale = the death of film: a memory of resistance in the form of collage films (or a collage of films) and a collage of texts.
The tale of this project is told in Chapter 3 and 4 and in the series of films. My Target is the underlying idea throughout the entire project (both the films and the text). As for how to contrast the conventional PhD Thesis by doing research-creation, this is explained in detail in Chapter 2 (Methodology). The analogy to the experimental arts starts for me (as
Ray proposes) with asking improper questions and re-introducing a surprise element as methods for writing, because artists working in this tradition have always "tended to see crises less as resulting from disastrous innovation than from futile repetition".59
Provocation and experiment are not solely the 'improprieties' of the so-called avant- garde in art, but of every creative thinker and writer. Similarly, on the part of Theory, I tried to avoid simple repetition by combining and recombining different methods and styles, as though it were a collage of many ways to do things differently. For this
Deleuze, Barthes and Benjamin are my three main sources of inspiration because they were masters in experimenting with hybrid forms of writing and in treating writing as a creative process similar to that of artists.
Gilles Deleuze, for example, saw his books on Francis Bacon and Proust as pure philosophy, and not as criticism, "since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, writers and filmmakers."60 As a consequence
Robert Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, 11. 60 Daniel and John Protevi. "Gilles Deleuze." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2Q08/entries/deleuze/ (accessed October 20, 2009).
44 Deleuze's own work is very imaginative (some say complex) and his writing style is highly elusive, to the point that his terminological inventions shift from one work to another and even within one text. "Deleuze did mean for his style to keep readers on his toes, or even to 'force' them to rethink their philosophical assumptions."61 This is, without doubt, one of the biggest contributions to academic thinking and writing in recent years: indeed thanks to him we now take entire academic disciplines less for granted and we can even consider them as creative fields, less as normative ones. In his work on
"What is Philosophy?" Deleuze places philosophy in relation to science and art as three modes of thought, without any hierarchy among them.62 He thus paved the road for a greater appreciation of the arts in academic environments as necessary patches of sensibility. To help infuse the academy with more creativity, Deleuze expects that the arts will push us out of our habits of perception "into the conditions of creation". According to Deleuze:
One has to be forced to think, starting with an art encounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation. Rather than 'a common sense' in which all the faculties agree in recognizing the 'same' object, we find in this communicated violence a 'discordant harmony' that tears apart the subject.63
Trying to undo the sameness of objects and familiarity of experiences is what the
Surrealists were also trying to achieve by creating surprise effects and re-contextualizing objects: both effective methods to achieve a "discordant harmony". This is key to resisting habitual thinking and to perpetuating a memory of resistance, which for Deleuze
61 Smith and Protevi, "Gilles Deleuze," 2. 62 This was his last work in collaboration with Felix Guattari: See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London: Verso, 1994. 63 Smith and Protevi, "Gilles Deleuze," 23.
45 is the ultimate goal toward which both philosophy and art should be striving. In an era like ours that puts so much impetus on progress, advancement, change and the new, declarations of the presence and importance of the past are like so many wet blankets.
That is why I dare to call my project, which is all about analogue film, a memory of resistance: it is a creative collage of questions, ideas and images connected by a
(hopefully) refreshing out-of-joint-ness that makes the entire project contemporary and pertinent.
Another foundation for this project is Barthes, who also in turn was inspired by
Proust: Barthes tried to be more creative in his writing by simply combining elements of the novel (a descriptive narrative with anecdotes and significant details) with essay writing (as in asking pertinent questions and offering commentary or explanations). He thus wanted to put himself "in the position of the subject who makes something and no longer of the subject who speaks about something".64 I do not suggest that therefore all film scholars should become filmmakers, that would be disastrous I'm afraid, but it would be nice to see more texts infused with creativity and non-academic story elements, more filmic elements. Moreover, Barthes' insight is definitely an encouragement to recognize that those who make films can potentially contribute a great deal to the field when they (decide to) write about film from their own experience as makers. I follow
Barthes when he states:
I am not studying a product, I assume a production... I proceed to another type of knowledge (that of the Amateur), and it is in this that I am methodical.65
64 Roland Barthes, "Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure..." In The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 286. This was a lecture on Proust for the College De France. 65 Barthes, Ibid.
46 Obviously Barthes' uses the French term 'amateur': the enthusiast, a lover (of art for example), who does something because he likes to do it, not because (s)he is paid to do so, and not the English term which has a much more negative connotation (as unskilful, non-professional, inexperienced). I hope to have achieved this with this first attempt to do a research-creation thesis, even with all the compromises which this has necessitated (see also Chapter 2).
Last but not least, Walter Benjamin continues to be a major source of inspiration and example. Where Deleuze has offered me new pathways, and Barthes - practical tools
- Benjamin always offers counsel66 about the difficulties and pleasure of creative activities such as writing, encouragements to use metaphors and anecdotes, and above all to be poetic and imaginative in anything one does simply because logic-based reasoning cannot account for all experience, definitely not for the artistic. Always surprising and challenging in his texts, many of them fragmented and anecdotal, Benjamin is the example of an author who consistently steers away from grand-narratives and clearly articulated coherent positions: his entire oeuvre is nonconformist, ambiguous and creative. As with Deleuze and Barthes, in Benjamin's work the literary merges with the philosophical. For example, in "The Task of the Translator" (1923), Benjamin explains
He considers to be able to give counsel an essential quality of for any storyteller: "An orientation toward practical interests is characteristic of many born storytellers.. .All this points to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers." : Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller", in Illuminations, Edited by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 86.
47 how all the deformations that a text undergoes in the translating process, helps the translator to see aspects that otherwise would remain hidden, while other formerly obvious aspects can become unreadable.57 He sees this as a productive mortification because it can bring to the foreground newly revealed historical affinities between objects and this, in turn, will generate new ideas (in Deleuze's terms 'concepts'). In "One Way
Street" under the heading 'Caution: Steps' Benjamin offers good advice on how to write good prose (and by extension academic texts that reads like prose):
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.68
And under the heading 'Technical Aid' he warns us about the difficulty writing something that strays from pure essay writing but, referring to photography, he also encourages us to do so, because:
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such a case, it is not even a bad photograph. And the truth refuses (like a child or a woman who doesn't love us), facing the lens of writing while we crouch under the black cloth, to keep still and look amiable. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self- immersion, whether by uproar, music, or cries for help. Who would count the alarm signals with which the inner world of the true writer is equipped? And to 'write' is nothing other than to set them jangling. Then the sweet odalisque rises with a start, snatches whatever first comes to hand in the melee of her boudoir (our cranium), wraps it around her, and- almost unrecognizable-flees from us to other people. But how well- constituted she must be, how healthily built, to step in such a way among them, contorted, rattled, and yet victorious, captivating!69
67 Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens", in Illuminations, Edited by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 68 Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street", in Selected Writings: Volume 1: 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 455. 69 Benjamin, "One Way Street", 480.
48 Benjamin did this very well, leaving us with lots of healthy, contorted, rattled, yet captivating texts and sentences. Writing about his style, Susan Sontag remarks that his sentences do not gently lead from one to another, and seem to avoid building an obvious line of reasoning, but instead each sentence "has to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes." She beautifully names
(t)his style "freeze-frame Baroque".70 Sontag further states that Benjamin's major essays always seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct. Although she wrote this before the work became available in North America, this definitely applies to his Arcades
Project, the ultimate exercise in avoiding grand-narratives by using multiple texts and quotations of various sources (see above). In "One Way Street" Benjamin qualifies this technique as 'hard-ware' and he explains:
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his convictions.71
As Hannah Arendt describes in her introduction to Illuminations (1969), Walter
Benjamin's work is so wonderful to work with, because it is infused with "something which may not be unique but is extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically." She continues:
And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the 'thought fragments' it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it up to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past-but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the
70 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 192. 71 Benjamin, "One Way Street", 481.
49 depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things 'suffer a sea-change' and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living - as 'thought fragments', as something 'rich and strange', and perhaps even as everlasting Urphanomene.11 (emphasis in original).
I see my task to try to be such a deep-sea diver, bringing up thought fragments and images (not all immune to the elements: see Chapter 4 about film decay), as a good amateur (in Barthes terms) resisting conformism (as Deleuze would want) and as a storyteller (with some guidance from Benjamin). First though, I want to elaborate another part of the framework for this thesis: rethinking film history and history writing.
1.6 Rethinking Film History
While there were some major advances in film theory in the 1970s and 1980s and, as stated above, the directions taken at this time evoked a strong revolt against the
'master narratives', more recently there has also been a revenge of film history on theory.
In the past decades film history, in major part thanks to the groundbreaking work of Tom
Gunning, has been a sub-discipline in full revival after it was long - in Gunning's words
- "the poor relation of film studies". Now more than ever though, film theory itself is historicized:73
72 Hannah Arendt, "Introduction", in Illuminations, Edited by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 51. 73 As mentioned earlier, a great example is the reader edited by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, Inventing Film Studies: a collection of essays that offers valuable insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of film studies. Contrary to most authors (e.g. Nichols) who linked the origins of the discipline to the late 1960s developments in the academy, this collection reveals the broader material and
50 Today the most relevant theorists and historians are those who recognize the degree to which history and theory work closely with one another. Indeed...it is often difficult to tell where the theorist leaves off and the historian begins.74
This can easily be explained by the self-reflexive awareness of the discursive processes of writing in film history itself (due to the influence of cultural studies). For example, many recent articles in film history challenge the conventional way of thinking about their respective periods, a trend in which Gunning was a pioneer. His famous article about "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early film and the (in)Credible Spectator" in which he coined the term 'Cinema of Attractions', as well as his other work on early cinema are the new cornerstones of contemporary film history and his work sparked a renewed and active interest in the field.75 Undoubtedly the latter was also inspired by the anxiety and nostalgia that were part of millennial dread, which coincided both with the centennial of the film medium itself in 1995, and its foreshadowed death since it was soon to be (completely) replaced by digital technologies.
Working within this 'Zeitgeist', Gunning returned to the beginning of cinema to demonstrate that it is even impossible to determine a precise moment for the beginning of film, de facto downplaying the exclusivity of the current situation and the impossible promise of history to settle such issues once and for all.76 He explains how from the
institutional forces—both inside and outside of the university—that started to shape the field long before the 1960s. 74 Cited in Gledhill & Williams, "The Return to History", in Reinventing Film Studies, 297-298. 75 Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credible Spectator". In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5th ed., 818-832. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 76 Tom Gunning, "Animated Pictures: Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future after 100 Films." In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 316-331. (London: Arnold, 2000).
51 beginning there was a profound uncertainty about the future of moving images because cinema was in an uneasy co-existence with rival claims of scientific demonstration and visual wonder (and still is). While he retraces how cinema came about together with and thanks to many other (technological) inventions, he also demonstrates how the genealogy of cinema only
takes on a tidy appearance when these diverse threads are spun together teleologically to culminate in the invention of cinema. However if we follow the thread backwards into the labyrinth of the twentieth century, it unravels into a disparate series of obsessions and fascinations. What commonly has been called the archaeology of cinema, fragments into multiple scenarios.11 (my emphasis)
As mentioned earlier, Benjamin had already set out to contrast traditional history writing by choosing to work with fragmented narratives and multiple scenarios. Gunning does something similar when he ties the apparent chaotic present of film to its equally chaotic origins as a medium. While unravelling some of the threads backwards, notably the links between cinema and instantaneous photography, other optical devices such as magic lanterns and their illusionist qualities, he returns to Benjamin and reminds us that the centennial of film does not only mark the first century of film history, but also the end of the first century of history captured by motion pictures. He notes that motion pictures literally embody Benjamin's description of the historical imperative, namely "to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger."78 Recalling cinema's origins at this point in time when we are facing the 'end of film' should open up a non-linear conception of film history within which "a chaotic and protean identity holds Utopian
Tom Gunning, "Animated Pictures", 319. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, 255.
52 possibilities and uncanny premonitions."79 This description remarkably resembles an
'irrational interval' in Deleuze's terminology: one could consider the current 'moment of danger' for film as a fissure in the tale of (film) history that restores the belief in a reservoir of un-thought yet immanent possibilities and modes of existence. Or as
Benjamin explains:
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was'.80 It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.81 (my emphasis)
Indeed, the latter corresponds largely to what Rodowick describes as the perpetuation of a memory of resistance, a resistance against habitual repetition and to all forms of conformism. To do this, one must "blast open the continuum of history" and "discover in the past the shards of a future discarded or disavowed."82 I cannot imagine a better description of the project I have set out to do, looking for shards of a future for film that has been discarded and disavowed by the commercialization and commodification of
79 Tom Gunning, "Animated Pictures", 318. 80 Benjamin refers here to Leopold von Ranke, a German historian of the nineteenth century. He is considered one of the founders of modern history based on the notion that history describes the past "as it essentially was". He is also considered the founding father of historicism. His ideas were challenged by recent approaches in history that depart from the notion that a historian merely reports facts. Rather, it is based on the personal choice of the historian and "history is defined the moment it is written". (See Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. "Leopold Von Ranke," http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/491217/Leopold-von-Ranke (accessed November 27, 2009). 81 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, 255 (New York, Schocken Books, 1969). 82 Tom Gunning, "Animated Pictures", 318.
53 film. In this time of 'danger' where we are facing the extinction of film, the time seems right to try to take a fresh look at the history and tradition of film, freeing it from the conformism that has encouraged so many to dispose of the medium and replace it with digital video and other media, or other forms of visual arts and entertainment. There is a future in film's past.83 Dudley Andrew therefore proposes that cinema studies in the new millennium should aim to see cinema as a transitional medium, one that carries forward the powerful traditions of visual and narrative representation from the nineteenth century:
Cinema constitutes a century-long threshold, uniquely able to orient us because it 'stands between'. It stands between popular expressions (magazines, pop music, TV) and the more considered and considerable arts (novel, opera, theatre); between its old-fashioned nineteenth-century technological base (gears and celluloid) and its constantly renewed contemporary appeal (high-definition TV, virtual reality); between a corporate or an anonymous mode of production and the auteur mode it sometimes adopts from literature. Standing between, the cinema has been particularly able to insert an interval of reflection between itself as representation and the world it references, an interval that ornate mega- films often make us forget and that digital entertainment seems eager to close. Market forces may urge the study of global Hollywood and digital technology—the world we are fast becoming—but Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 84 urges the study of the whole century of cinema, not for nostalgia's sake but for the sake of everything that history and criticism can bring to education and to the politics of the present.85 (my emphasis)
I identify with Andrew's proposition to treat cinema as an 'in between' of anonymous productions and auteur works, corporate and independent productions, huge Hollywood
831 am hinting at Rick Hancox's article "Film - is there a Future in our Past?" Incite! 1, no. 1 (Fall 2008), http://www.incite-online.net/hancox.html (accessed February 2, 2009). 84 Andrew refers here to the 1976 film by the Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner, which portrays both the disillusionment experienced by the "generation of 1968" and the Utopian idea of a more egalitarian future. Jonah was Tanner's most successful collaboration with his frequent scenarist, the Marxist art critic John Berger: Dudlley Andrew, The "Three Ages" of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115, no. 3 (2000): 341-351 85 Ibid., 348.
54 productions and small and often forgotten films, or even just film fragments, film traces, as appearances of nearness,86 and to treat history—as Benjamin aptly described—as "the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now (Jetztzeit)."81 Following Benjamin's example, my project aims at presenting a stream of thought about the medium film and its future, approached from different angles, in multiple and possibly fragmented narratives, through the gleaning and recycling of texts and styles, images and sounds, interweaving several (analogue and digital) time-lines and extending or shrinking individual film frames to discover significant details and possibly many tensions (especially between so-called 'high-art' and 'low-art', video and film, etc..) As Benjamin also points out:
Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a nomad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a nomad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history— blasting a specific life out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelled88; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.89 (my emphasis)
86 In his" Arcades Project Walter Benjamin has an interesting definition of "trace" in relationship to "aura": "The trace is appearance of nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing, in the aura, it takes possession of us." In: The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). 87 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, 261. 88 He uses the Hegelian term "aufheben" which can mean to preserve, to elevate or to cancel. I am not sure if this is translated properly. The phrase would read very differently with the word "elevated" instead. 89 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", in Illuminations, 262-263.
55 I attempt to blast the specific life of (mostly 16mm) films out of the homogenous history of film, in particular those films that are often overlooked and forgotten, many orphaned, except for the pieces saved as part of found-footage films: educational films, industrial films, newsreels, documentaries, training films, home movies etc... These films are an important part of our cultural history, but are rarely given this status in the history of film.
Although originally prime examples of how cinema has always tried to provide a new standard of realist representation, these films didn't age all that well (the main characters, settings, their style and plots look dated, even their material quality shows signs of the times: often they are scratched and discoloured) so that now they embody more a sense of unreality, "a realm of impalpable phantoms" in Tom Gunning's terms.90 It might very well be this particular characteristic that makes them more evident to our generation than to their contemporaries,91 which is, as Benjamin states, quite apart from the question of value.92 These were also the first types of films that were no longer shot on film as soon as video achieved the status of a professional medium. Now we often rediscover them as so-called 'orphaned' films, reminiscences of a film era past, memories that I want to seize hold of in this time of danger, trying to wrest this tradition away from the conformism that overpowered it: to elevate these films to memories of resistance. I will also look at films that are in themselves 'blasts' that open the continuum of film history at this time when the medium itself is in peril, films that explore the specificities of film's life, and
Tom Gunning, "Animated Pictures," 318. 911 think Giorgio Agamben would agree with this (see Introduction). 92 Walter Benjamin, "The Medium Through Which Works of Art Continue to Influence Later Ages" in Selected Writings: Volume 1: 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 235.
56 films that use damaged film stock to paint the tale of film's fragile material state after its first glorious century. These films are in themselves configurations of tensions, embodying the cessation of a life for film as one continuous stream of moving images and ideas. We now live with the knowledge that even many of the films preserved in film archives are crumbling to dust, not even counting the many films already permanently lost because of material neglect and the selective amnesia of our (film) culture.
Film history as a discipline is basically a constant struggle with the status of film as a crumbling object. Dominique Pai'ni—someone who has also written extensively on experimental and avant-garde cinema—connects film history, film preservation and recent filmmaking with the apparent disintegration of film texts (the fragmentation of narratives). In his view, in recent decades we have been witnessing the transformation of cinema's "archival imaginary"—the rediscovery of, and engagement with the films of the past by modern filmmakers—into an imaginary of the "ruins of cinema". He notes that while formerly the notion of a 'preserved' film was virtually synonymous with a film restored and re-shown in its entirety, the preservation and presentation of incomplete films—especially surviving fragments of films from the 1910s—has become more commonplace over the past two decades. He admits that as a film programmer at the
Cinematheque Francaise, he often feels like he lives in an excavation site where new pieces of film constantly come to the surface, "des morceaux de temps oublies."93 Pai'ni also identifies a renewed interest in recycled and found footage.94 According to Pai'ni, this trend also "suggests a tendency to recast the history of film not as a successive series of
93 Dominique Pai'ni, Le Cinema, Un Art Moderne. Preface by Hubert Damisch. Paris: Cahiers du cinema, 1997), 138. 94 Pai'ni describes more particularly the films of the Armenian documentary found-footage filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian. See http://www.artavazd-pelechian.net/
57 complete works, but as a vast and heterogeneous visual anthropology of film fragments, an archaeology of ruins."95 This "art of the ruins," which has ties with modern cinema and particularly with the tradition of found-footage films since the 1960s, is an art linked to disaster, collapse, destruction and chaos.96 This is obviously why there is also a renewed interest in this genre at the time of 'film's death' with all the insecurity that the digitalization of the medium brings. But this new direction also opens up many new possibilities for a more creative and imaginative approach to film history. As Pai'ni aptly states: "l'incomplet fait rever. Puis l'inacheve a fait penser et creer. Desormais l'incomplet fait penser a son tour."97 After all, it requires more of the imagination of the researcher to put various (and sometimes damaged) fragments together than to study complete works with a tight narrative (as in most feature-length fiction films). The latter was, and still is, the dominant trend in film studies, a trend that besides overlooking incomplete and damaged films of all ages also obscured many experimental films, a genre that by definition avoids 'normal' narrative lines and straightforward interpretations.
As stated earlier, so far the preference for tight narratives and feature-length fiction films has inspired a lot of film study that is heavy on interpretation, trying to discover what the work means instead of what it is. According to Susan Sontag
"interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted and proceeds
Cited in Stefan Jovanovich, "The Ending(s) of Cinema", 4. 96 Pai'ni, Le Cinema, Un Art Moderne, 145. 97 "The incomplete makes us dream. While the incomplete makes us think and create. From now on also the incomplete makes us think" (my translation). Pai'ni, Ibid., 146.
58 from there."98 Our culture, which is based on excess and overproduction - and the overproduction of images has only gotten worse in the digital age - is marked by a steady loss of sharpness of our sensory experience. Under these circumstances, where "all conditions conjoin to dull our sensory faculties, and it is in the light of the condition of our senses, of our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed."99 Hence, Sontag argues that our task is "not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut content back so that we can see the thing at airm (my emphasis).
Is it possible then by studying fragments or leftovers where the rest of the film is eaten away by time and chemicals, or single frame-enlargements and stills (such as
Barthes suggested),101 that we will experience again what makes film 'film' and re(dis)cover the magic of cinema, its photogeniel The gaps between these images, cuts between two moving images not motivated by movement or action such as the places where images are washed away or cut out by damage or deterioration, can function as irrational intervals that resist codification (since they do not signify or represent). This way we can try to contribute to the Utopian aspect of philosophy and art, namely to perpetuate a memory of resistance. For this task, we do not need more hermeneutics, but
"we need an erotics of art"102 and we need to recover (the use of) our senses. One possible strategy to achieve this goal is to give more space/voice to those who make art
98 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 8. 99 Sontag, Against Interpretation, 8. 100 Ibid., 8. 101 See also the series of film stills included in the appendix. 102 Sontag, Against Interpretation, 8.
59 and to let them (to paraphrase Sontag) make art - and by analogy make our experience - more, rather than less, real to us. Introducing studio-based artistic PhDs in the academy is a first step, even if in many places this is still a controversial and unsure project (see chapter 2). It is also a project that risks achieving exactly the opposite of what we are striving for; to make art conform to academic knowledge instead of the other way around, especially in times when even knowledge is more and more commodified.
1.7 Conclusion: Fissures and Fragments
The art of story telling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out This however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see it merely a 'symptom of decay', let alone a 'modern' symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see new beauty in what is vanishing. (Walter Benjamin, The Story Teller, 87).
Overall the field of film studies shows an interesting return to aesthetic concerns, fresh approaches with concretely localized and historicized theory, a fragmentation of narratives and, most importantly, a celebration of creative practices. In a time when there is an overproduction of images and powerful new tools to create and manipulate still and moving images, there is a need to re-affirm the authenticity and specificity of film, even if a large part of that task is now to show off its fragility and fleetingness. For example, as
Rodowick points out:
Often criticized in the history of the aesthetic as a medium of mechanical copying, the aesthetic experience of cinema is in essence non-repeatable. No two prints of the same film will ever be identical—each will always bear its unique traces of destruction with a specific projection history; thus
60 each print is in some respects unique. And for similar reasons, there will never be identically repeatable viewings of the same print."103
Now that film is threatened with disappearance both due to its own fragility and because it is under pressure from (new) digital technology, is there a sudden awareness that something makes film unique? The irony is that film studies always questioned its own object of study to affirm itself as a valid academic field of study, but now that it has acquired that status its very object of study is faced with uncertainty and extinction: the question 'what is cinema?' could soon become 'what was cinema?'104 And we, like the classicists could be studying dead objects. I strongly believe that when filmmaking and film viewing become fully digital, a certain cinematic experience will be irretrievably lost. I am also very aware that, especially for 16mm, a lot of the craft of filmmaking (e.g. flat-bed editing) and some specific film genres (e.g. industrial and educational films) are already long lost. On the other hand, the time seems ripe to explore possibilities to retrieve some of this past and work with it to create a memory of resistance against some of the pessimism and the simplicity of the debate about the death, or the total disappearance, of film. There is a new openness, both in film studies and in the arts, to retrieve some of cinema's magic and one way to do this is by returning to the surrealist's magical tricks and other experimentation.
From the beginning of film, artists working in the (then) new medium understood that the medium's strength lay not in straightforward narrative (something literature and theatre can do better) so they boldly experimented with non-narrative forms and considered narrative as secondary to style. For example they replaced logical exposition
103 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 20. 104 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 31.
61 with multiple point-of-views, complex allusions and collages of fragmentary images.
They resisted the commercial film logic in favour of 'art cinema'. For decades, films were being made that covered the whole continuum from commercial narrative films to uncompromising non-narrative avant-garde films. In the 1970s though, coinciding with the beginning of film studies, the production of films (and the attention for films) shifted and the middle ground vanished, creating a deep rift between the two worlds. This event helped obscure the fact that film is an art form, and that its birth and growth was almost immediately parallel to the birth and growth of modernism in the other arts. This while, as Bergan notes:
Film is generally at its best when it recognizes its roots in modernism, i.e. when it rejects conventional notions of realism, disengages from bourgeois values, and questions the primacy of narration...Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are increasingly seeing the avant-garde abandon the cinema for the gallery—a shift made possible by the digital revolution. It is becoming necessary to redefine film without references to its previous conditions of existence, by reference, not to the narrow context of the history of cinema, but to the wider field of art history.105
This attempt to redefine film is part of what I have set out to do in this thesis. Ray returns to the Dadaists to find inspiration for a new way to study and write about film, following
Benjamin who in "The Author as Producer" (1934) already recognized the Dadaists as modern storytellers.106 As Benjamin points out, in their work the Dadaists used collage techniques to test art's authenticity — for example, by inserting traces of the real world in their art: cigarette stubs; bus tickets; scraps of textiles etc... These Dadaist techniques
Ronald Bergan, "How Cinema Lost its Soul." The London Independent, January 17th, 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/how-cinema-lost- its-soul-432479.html, sec. Art and Entertainment: Film (accessed 24 November, 2008). 106 Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in Selected Writings: Volume 2: 1927- 1934. Edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 774.
62 were all experiments in search of interesting alternative narrative. For this project I consider the found-footage itself as the basic material for my collages. They are traces of a craft, the threads for a digital narrative interlacing of film images, no longer silenced and left to the forces of nature and film chemicals in the rusty film cans that are erasing them from film history. The challenge of this project was to discover interesting new stories in these cut-up images, stories that still bear resemblance to their original content but that take us into new avenues, especially when using images of 'realist' films (e.g documentaries, educational films, home movies). This is how I am literally inserting traces of the real world in my film art. Compared to photos or icons, moving images are already in themselves the most concrete meaning-bearers, exactly because they are moving images. Yet, once cut up and used in a different context (and transferred to digital), they open up possibilities (sometimes necessities) for new interpretations (which is in keeping with the practice of most found-footage filmmakers). It is my aim, however, to ensure that all the found-documentary-like-footage continues to bear traces of its original context, so that it remains immune to (in)different interpretations. I want to respect their original stories, while using them to tell the story of film, both about what has already been lost of it, and of what lives on, and how.
The danger of this project is to romanticize handcrafted film and any pre-digital mode of production. Yet exploring alternative ways to work with film allows me to explore the tendencies of an era, to tell the story of change, not just from past to present, but also from present into the future. Like Benjamin, I don't see the loss of narrative and traditional story telling (in film) as a "symptom of decay,"107 but indeed as a possibility to
107 Benjamin, The Story Teller, 87.
63 see new beauty in what is vanishing (literally vanishing in the case of film decay). Even
if it is a bit of a stretch to apply Benjamin's point in "The Story Teller" of how the craft
of story telling got lost to how the craft of analogue filmmaking got lost, there is no doubt
that he makes a similar argument for mechanically produced images in his famous essay
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).108 That essay is not a
tragic tale of irreversibility full of nostalgia for past crafts and past worlds. Benjamin
"sensed that beyond the losses, there was also in some ways a restoration or a rescue of
experience, and its seedbed was the technical present."109 I take a similar stance as my
point of departure.
108 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations, 217 - 252. 109 Esther Leslie, "Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft." Journal of Design History 11, no. 1 (1998): 8.
64 CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH-CREATION AND DOCTORAL DEGREES IN FINE ARTS
// would be an A.B.C.D.E.F. ... of entertainment, an art of entertainment. ... G.H.LJ.K.L.M.N.O.P.Q.R.S.T.U.V.W.X.Y.Z. ... To forget. To sleep, serene, right-minded. New horizons take shape. I see new horizons coming toward me, and the hope of a new alphabet.
(Marcel Broodthaers, Jardin d'Hiver, 1973)
2.1 Introduction
At the 2002 University Film and Video Conference at Ithaca College, Igor Korsic from the University of Ljubljana, presided over a panel on "The CILECT1 Theory for
Practice Project". He started by expressing his feelings about contemporary film theory and his expose shared many of the dissatisfactions discussed in the previous chapter: it suffers from theoretical snobbery; critical and aesthetic narrowness; and ideological bias.
Korsic added to the list the concern that film theory stifles film practice. This echoes a conversation that Gill Branston briefly pointed to in "Why Theory?" Citing a paper by
Pat Holland,3 Branston stated that there "may be some truth in the claim that the
1 CILECT stands for Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinema et Television or International Association of Film and Television Schools. 2 Cited in Renata Jackson "Practical Aesthetics in Critical Studies", Unpublished paper: http://soma.sbcc.edu/Users/DaVega/FILMST_118/SCRIPTS/GENERALTHEORY/Practi cal%20Aesthetics%20in%20Critical%20Studies.pdf,(Accessed November 24, 2008). Renata Jackson teaches at the School of Filmmaking of the North Carolina School of the Arts. It is worth noting that Fred Camper already raised this at the 1989 Experimental Film Congress in Toronto. He argued that the institutionalization of film had stifled the inventiveness of experimental film in particular, and if not said in so many words, that this meant the death of film (personal conversation with Barbara Sternberg, one of the organizers of the Experimental Film Conference). 3 Patricia Holland "Thinking the impractical: doing the unthinkable - the uneasy meeting of theory and practice." Paper delivered to the Association for Media Cultural and Communication Studies Conference, Sheffield, December 1997. Unfortunately I was not able to get access to this paper except as cited in Gill Branston, "Why Theory?" In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 18-33. London: Arnold, 2000.
65 reflective effort of critical thinking may 'hold up' production and even be inimical to creativity".4 Elaborating on Korsic's ideas about the 'trouble' with film theory, Renata
Jackson (who uses Korsic's statement as an introduction for her paper on "Practical
Aesthetics in Critical Studies") reminds us that the theories haven't stifled film- practitioners as much as they have restrained the film scholars
who over the past twenty-some years essentially had to toe the psychoanalytic and Marxist party line in order to be taken seriously in academics, get teaching jobs, or get published. But Korsic's basic point— with which I [Renata Jackson] heartily agree—is that the lion's share of these theories are not only problematic as theoretical arguments, but also make no sense in a production context. That is, they contribute almost nothing to an aspiring young filmmaker's understanding of the motion picture medium from a practical, let alone an artistic, point of view.5
Indeed, often (film-)theory had also a limiting effect on my creativity by leading me to force ideas on the images I would otherwise not have considered, leading to films that were intellectual deadlocks: theory has a tendency to take the life out of one's film projects. The risk is indeed to 'think' film projects into being, which may result in smart films but not necessarily captivating and touching work. I would argue (from my experience) that there is actually a more positive inverse relationship between theory and practice. Notably, one's personal experience making films results in a better understanding of the film medium and more advanced theoretical thinking about the film medium than theory can offer. What does that imply for studio-based thesis projects in which theory and practice have to go hand-in-hand?
4 Branston "Why Theory?", 23. 5 Jackson, "Practical Aesthetics in Critical Studies," 1.
66 As part of the CILECT project mentioned above, Tuula Mehtonen from the
University of Art and Design in Helsinki, published her experience teaching "Theory for
Film Schools" in the 2002 CILECT newsletter. She focuses specifically on her experience with the MA and PhD programs that allow film experts with practical experience to produce research. She concludes that the key issue is to find the right motivation and the right methods to integrate theory in artistic practice, an issue that I struggled with throughout this thesis project. According to Mehtonen
both teachers and students are dogged by the idea that a degree at a film school plus experience as an artist or a filmmaker is not enough. The feeling is that to create valid theory we should take another degree somewhere else. This cannot continue. We must begin to have confidence in ourselves as experts in our own field. All stages of filmmaking require the attitude of a researcher, but it is rarely articulated systematically...Very little academic research has been done on making films. Film theory, on the other hand, which examines cinema as a product of culture is a large branch of scholarship. Most trends in film theory have very little to do with the actual process of making films. To be slightly provocative, I would say that most trends in cinematic theory have only slight practical significance.6 (my emphasis)
Mehtonen continues by arguing against the over-interpretation of films, a common practice in film studies, joining Susan Sontag in her plea against the interpretation of art.
She suggests that the more sensible approach for these practice-based thesis degrees is to work with formalistic and neo-formalistic theories, and to encourage students to reflect on their own work in relation to other filmmakers and to film history. "We should encourage them to use films made by others and everything written by other filmmakers as reference material for their own work and research."7 This is indeed one of the most
6 Tuula Mehtonen, "Theory for Film Schools at UIAH' Helsinki." CILECT News 35, (January 2002): 6. 7 Ibid., 7.
67 common approaches for practice-based MA programs and MFA degrees. But does this
also suffice on a PhD level to count as academic research?
2.2 Practice-Based PhDs and Questions of Academic Legitimacy
On September 10th, 2004 the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium organized a symposium titled "Practice-based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design".8 This symposium was specifically aimed at designing the content for the brand new Doctorate in Fine Arts that was instated by a 2003 decree of the Flemish
Government. Interested artists, academics, students and decision-makers attended the conference, all of whom provided a comprehensive overview of similar practices and experiences from art schools and colleges from all over Europe.9 Most interesting was a presentation by Sandra Kemp, director of research at the London Royal College of Art, where studio-based research at the time made up for no less than 80% of the 140 doctorates. In this program, the principal condition for studio work to become PhD
'research' is that there has to be a written component submitted with the work. This text, which must relate to the body of work presented, can take the form of either a classical dissertation or of 'notebooks'.10 As Kemp explains, at the start of the program the obligation to provide a written component was debated at length, but in the end the
Conference at the Institute for Practice based Research in the Arts, Leuven, September 10 2004. Papers available from Practice Based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design. CD-ROM with all conference papers, edited by Hilde Van Gelder. (Belgium: Association K.U. Leuven, 2004). 9 Ibid. 10 Sandra Kemp cited by Hilde Van Gelder, "Preface" in Practice Based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design, 2.
68 workgroup in charge of designing the PhD program decided that a written component as part of the thesis is a necessity to be able to distinguish 'research' from 'advanced practice.' They recommended that "the textual component be envisaged and shaped through the metaphor of a route-map, which would chart the processes of the work and leave a permanent trace."11 More than a decade later, the Arts and Humanities Research
Board in the UK still endorses the view that a creative, performance or practice-led output can't stand on its own, but that it needs to be accompanied by written documentation. This can all be seen as a beginning to infuse art theory with practical significance, or film theory with a systematic understanding of film from a practical and artistic point of view. But the question remains, when this writing is shaped as
'notebooks', will the knowledge indeed be recognized as a valid contribution to art theory. Or, as Andrew Partizio of the Edinburgh College of Art asked: "can the PhDs qualification accept art research that embraces ambiguity, unorthodoxy and radicalism?"12
On the other hand, isn't asking this question adhering to the old traditions of the academic world, and those of the natural sciences in particular: the need for a clear methodology; a verification process; the possibility to repeat the 'experiment'; and proper documentation? We know that this traditional academic model ignores the plurality of methods and techniques that exists in many fields of research, particularly in the
11 Sandra Kemp, "Critical Practice: the Development of Studio-Based Research at the Royal College of Art" in Practice Based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design, 3. 12 Andrew Partizio "Unfolding Research: Recent Transaction in Edinburgh", in Practice Based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design, 2.
69 humanities. Neither does it acknowledge the valuable contributions of writers such as
Barthes and Benjamin who also worked with 'notebooks' and 'route-maps'; and the contributions of pragmatist philosophers such as Francis Bacon and John Dewey. For
Dewey, action is a central process of learning, which has both a social and an aesthetic dimension. In his booker/ as Experience (1934) he firmly opposes the Cartesian division between mind and body. Such historical examples can help to assert that in the creative arts we are not seeking recognition for a 'lesser' order of academic enquiry or expression of creativity (since science is also a creative activity) that would undermine and devalue
'conventional' doctorates.13 I think it is important to clarify that as academics in the creative arts we are just trying to assert the distinctive characteristics of our subject area, respectful of both differences as well as similarities with all the other forms of scientific enquiry and innovation.
Substantial support for this argument can also be found in the works of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly in What is Philosophy? (1994).14 For them to think is to experiment and create, not to interpret or reflect. "Thought is always in contact with the new, the emergent, what is in the midst of making itself, and thus supposes a distinction between knowledge and thought." In other words "thinking or thought is defined not by what we know, but by the virtual or what is un-thought."15 Indeed,
Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as an activity that consists in the creation or invention of concepts, and not in the habitual repetition of what is already known. In his
John Dewey, Art as Experience. (New York: Paragon Books, 1979 [1934]). 14 Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London: Verso, 1994. 15 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Post-Contemporary Interventions. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 198.
70 introduction to Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2005), Daniel Smith explains the method by which Deleuze defines how the creation of concepts relates to thinking in percepts and affects, which is the terrain of the artists:
'One can very easily think without concepts,' Deleuze writes, 'but as soon as there is a concept, there is truly philosophy'. Yet art itself is an equally creative enterprise of thought, but one whose object is to create sensible aggregates rather than concepts. Great artists are also great thinkers, but they think in terms of percepts and affects rather than concepts: painters think in terms of lines and colours, just as musicians think in sounds, filmmakers think in images, writers think in words, and so on. None of these activities has any priority over the others. Creating a concept is neither more difficult nor more abstract than creating new visual, sonorous, or verbal combinations in art; conversely, it is no easier to read an image, painting, or novel than it is to comprehend a concept. Philosophy, for Deleuze, can never be undertaken independently of art (or science); it always enters into relations of mutual resonance and exchange with these other domains, though for reasons that are always internal to philosophy itself}6 (my emphasis)
Hence, the idea of creative PhDs (literally a doctorate in philosophy) in the fine arts could
(should?) be a fruitful combination of the practice of philosophy to create concepts, with the art of creating affect (sensible aggregates). Rodowick puts it more concretely, and this is the main inspiration for my project:
The special task of the simulacral arts and a philosophy of resistance is to interpret and evaluate, as well as to invent alternative ways of thinking and modes of existence immanent in, yet alternative to, late capitalism and liberal democracies. This is why it is necessary to argue that philosophy creates concepts rather than 'reflecting on' or 'communicating' notions. What is lacking is neither communication nor information; rather, we suffer from too much of both. We lack for neither truth nor knowledge. What we lack is creation and the will to experiment. "We lack resistance to the present" write Deleuze and Guattari.17 (Rodowick's emphasis)
16 Daniel W. Smith, "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in the Logic of Sensation." Translator's Introduction to Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, by Gilles Deleuze, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), viii. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, 205.
71 Hence, the fine arts can contribute to academia, not just by creating new experiences and inventing alternative ways of thinking, but by remaining critical of existing knowledge and of how knowledge is passed on (in academia). The (fairly) new creative PhDs are the ideal sites to experiment with a renewed convergence between philosophy and art that opens up un-thought yet immanent possibilities and alternative ways of thinking. They effectively offer the possibility to perpetuate a memory of resistance.
2.3 The Compromise Model
Since there is a possible danger to marginalize the creative PhD projects within the academic research context, there is a tendency to adopt a general template for research. This has happened in the UK where the Arts and Humanities Research Board defined the requirements for ALL research (including artistic projects) as follows:
1. it must be driven by a guiding 'question', 'issue' or 'problem', 2. a broader context must exist for the work being proposed, 3. a program, set of methods or processes can be described which will interrogate the issues at hand, 4. the above will result in some kind of communicable outcome: an exhibition, design or publication.
Although at first sight this is a rather open model, one that seems to be inclusive rather than restrictive, this directive opens a can of worms for the fine arts, namely the divisive debate between 'art for art's sake' and 'art for life's sake' (art with a cause, a purpose).
For instance, the first guideline is fairly open stating that the research has to be driven by
'a question', 'issue' or 'problem', leaving room to produce art for art's sake as a thesis: after all the work can simply be made in response to the (open) question of 'what is art?'
18 Cited by Andrew Patrizio, "Unfolding Research: Recent Transaction in Edinburgh.", 4.
72 or 'is this art?' However, the third guideline seems to make it more difficult to present a
work of art that does not have any utilitarian, didactic or moral function since it explicitly
demands that 'issues' are interrogated by applying "a program, set of methods or processes." In other words, the guideline implicitly asks 'what is (this) art for?' or 'what
does (this) art question and how?' Without trying to resolve this issue in any way, I want to remind readers that both positions and their histories have their importance and that if there is a compromise to be made that allows a bridge between science PhDs and those in
fine arts, that it is also important to find a model that can include all art, no matter what inspired the artist in the act of creation. Indeed, the idea of art for art's sake is important to preserve the independence of the artist and it is borne out over four historical movements that used this claim in defence against forces that tried to restrain artists.19 By the same token, the idea of art for life's sake is important to guarantee the meaningfulness of art and the integration of the artist in society. Most fine arts programs are not homogenous and in practice these two competing beliefs usually exist side-by-side, just as is the case for the art world in general. As Michael Ginsborgh from the Wimbledon
School of Art wrote:
One could posit two very broad, interdependent tendencies in current Art practice. They should certainly not be taken as exclusive...In the first critical discourse is not only admitted into the arena of practice, it is seen as constituting it...In the second tendency the values at work are very different. Intuition, discovery and spontaneity are the priorities...Verbal
According to Iredell Jenkins there is very little continuity to be found in the history of this concept, but it can be seen as containing four major chapters, "each consisting of a counter attack against a different enemy. These enemies can be conveniently labelled as conventional morality and religion, utility and didacticism, science, and subject matter." For a detailed history and overview see Iredell Jenkins, "Art for Art's Sake." In Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, Vol 1., (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973).
73 articulation and criticism are secondary in the face of visual practice itself—unless, that is, they deal with form, technique, or process.20
This dual existence in the art world is also reflected in the set up of most PhD programs in art and design. Finding a compromise between a more and a less traditional approach to producing a PhD thesis, most of the existing fine art programs seem to offer two possibilities for the thesis projects, depending on if the artistic object is either the substance or the context of the research.
1. Practice-based-research: the thesis is a body of artistic (or pedagogical) work
with a systematic analysis of the research findings as the written
component (essay thesis), placing the work in a broader context such as
the art world at large, cultural institutions, society, history etc...
2. Practice-as-research: the thesis is the artistic product itself, resulting from the
research, supplemented by research notes that explain practical issues or
technical innovations (the 'notebook' or 'route-map'). Such a project aims
at renewing or expanding the artistic vocabulary and new forms of artistic
expression.21
Michael Ginsborgh, cited in Fiona. "A Dual Inheritance: The Politics of Educational Reform and PhDs in Art and Design." Journal of Art and Design Education 20, no. 3 (October, 2001): 305-306. 1 These categories are based on a combination of the requirements of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leiden, as they were presented by F. De Ruiter in a paper titled "A promotion in the Arts: an Art in Itself and those of the University of Art and Design in Helsinki as outlined by Kristopher Albrecht in a paper titled "Art as Practical Approach to Research", both part of the collected Practice Based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design conference papers.
74 The latter model is more of a deviation from the classic model of PhD theses, at least in the humanities. But on closer inspection this model actually shows lots of similarities with PhD theses in pure sciences based on scientific experiments. Nonetheless, most authors agree that this is the 'newest' form for a PhD thesis (in the humanities). It therefore needs more support and explanation to become a standard practice. One way to build support is by emphasizing the similarities between arts and sciences. After all, 'ars' in Latin stands for art and science, as well as skill, method, knowledge, craft and even
'trick.'22 Several authors point to the fact that both art and science are based on skills and inspiration, rationality and intuition. Moreover, as Frans De Ruiter, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leiden reminds us (without referring to Deleuze), "both the scientist and the artist are faced with problems for which they have to find new and original solutions through an open and non-conformist attitude" (my emphasis).
Nevertheless, how to integrate and validate an open and non-conformist attitude in academia, remains a difficult and complex question.
2.4 Modes of Research Through Creative Practice
In 1997 Christopher Frayling, at the time a professor of Cultural History at the
Royal College of Art, chaired a workgroup for the UK Council for Graduate Education.
This workgroup had to explore possible modes of research through creative practice,
It is worth noting that 'ars' (art) and 'facere' (to make) together became the word 'artifice' in English: the use of cunning or skill so as to deceive. Paperback Dictionary and Thesaurus & Wordpower Guide. "Artifice". Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 43. 23 Frans De Ruiter "A promotion in the Arts: An Art in itself, 2. Paper presented at the Practice-Based PhD in the creative and performing arts and design conference (K. U. Leuven, September 10th, 2004).
75 meaning that the art-work is the research and not an illustration or a critique, and where the end product is an artefact or a prototype rather than a 100, 000 word thesis. Frayling had previously argued for an expressive tradition in research, which has as a goal, not
"communicable knowledge" in the sense of verbal communication, but "in the sense of visual or iconic or imagistic methodologies and communication (through the moving image, product semantics and so on)."24 In his article on "Research in Art and Design",
Frayling defined three categories of research:
- research into art and design (historical, aesthetic, theoretical)
- research through art and design (material, developmental or action)
- research for art and design (where the thinking is embodied in the artefact)
(my emphasis)25
Although not explicitly stated in the document, it is easy to see how these three categories of research can lead to different models of studio-based theses. The first category of research is closest to the traditional model of a thesis in the humanities, the last one to a thesis in applied sciences. The middle one is the model closest to the traditional idea of studio-based fine arts (the model applied in most existing MFA programs). One could also consider these three models as three different (not necessarily chronological) phases
(or methodologies) in the making of art: the stage of creating the concept and context for a work of art, the actual creation (building, crafting, editing) of (an) art (piece) and just experimenting with new methods and materials, not necessarily resulting in a finished piece or work of art.
Christopher Frayling "Research in Art and Design" in Royal College of Art Research Papers, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1993/4), 1-5 as cited in Sandra Kemp, "Critical Practice", 2. 25 Cited in Kemp, "Critical Practice," 26
76 Once more, none of this is radically new. Frayling's categories are based on the ideas Herbert Read developed in his 1943 book Education Through Art. At the time his book provided art education with a rationale, a defence and an optimistic program to gain credibility as a discipline. Read's book incorporates definitions of authenticity in art and of artistic creation, and it offers explanations of how images materialize from imagination. It also compares typologies from the study of children's drawings and paintings with the literature on (developmental) psychology. It is worth remembering that
Read concluded that the pursuit of authentic avant-garde creativity is so emotionally and nervously demanding that it is the conscious choice of very few. He suggested that, although creative and artistic activity is considered an 'obsessional' activity in the adult's realm, in the child's realm it manifests itself with the effortlessness of inherited biological reflexes. He remarks that the intervention of logical, intellect-dependent education at around the age often - which is considered 'normal' in conventional education - inhibits creativity and he proposes to rethink the educational system to make it more 'natural'.
This is in order to find ways to encourage the perfection and the prolonging of pre-logical creative states.27
In an ideal world the new possibilities of creative PhDs could be seen as the final or highest stage of making the educational system more 'natural', were it not for the fact
26 Herbert Read was a poet, literary critic, philosopher, art critic and a historian of modern art. He was one of Britain's most remarkable theorists, a tireless promoter of the avant-garde art, and a great admirer of expressionist and Surrealist art. See Michael Whitworth, "Sir Herbert Read". In The Literary Encyclopedia. 11 February 2001. http://www.litencvc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3719, (accessed 28 November, 2009). 27 When published, Read's philosophy gave new meaning to the work of many thousands of art teachers and it remains a key work in Art Education. See also David Thistlewood, "Herbert Read (1893-1968)." Prospects, Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 24, no. 1&2 (March 1994): 375-390.
77 that by the time a student reaches the phase of a PhD degree, he or she has also been trained by a much higher quantity of logical-intellect-dependent-education so that it is a much bigger challenge to reconnect with one's pre-logical, creative states. As stated previously, one of the biggest challenges to making a creative studio-based doctoral thesis is to strike a balance between theory and practice; to not let the theory (mis-)lead,
(de-)form or interfere with the practice to such an extent that the final product may have effect but no affect. It is worth emphasizing that Read was also inspired by the avant- garde and the Surrealists in particular, just as Ray when he turns to their playful methods in his attempt to reinvent film studies. Earlier I suggested that the Surrealists provide my main source of hope and inspiration for the question of how to remain creative and thoughtful in a heavily theoretical, logical and knowledge-based environment. I would therefore like to follow a lead from Andre Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto:
The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them—first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason. The analysts themselves have everything to gain by it. But it is worth noting that no means has been designated a priori for carrying out this undertaking, that until further notice it can be construed to be the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its success is not dependent upon the more or less capricious paths that will be followed.28 (my emphasis)
The recurrent interest in Surrealism when thinking about research in the creative arts is not surprising, since the main method of Surrealism is to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Most authors try to
Andre Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism." Surrealist.com: History of surrealism, surreal art, and the artists involved in the surrealist art movement, http://surrealist.com/Surrealist_Manifesto.aspx, (accessed 10 December, 2006), n.p.
78 define how studio-based research could contribute to academics by constructing alternative realities that test and contest the limitations of the knowledge bases that already exist. Read, for example, was inspired by the non-conformist methods of avant- garde artists and the Surrealists to make subconscious images emerge by combining mental, physical and perceptual faculties. Based on his findings he developed a model with four distinct artistic activities or types of aesthetic expression:
1. Realism, naturalism, impressionism are terms that indicate an imitative attitude
towards the external world (nature).
2. Superrealism and futurism are terms that indicate a reaction from the external
world towards immaterial (spiritual) values.
3. Fauvism and expressionism are terms that indicate a desire to express the artist's
personal sensations.
4. Cubism, constructivism and functionalism are terms that indicate a preoccupation
with the inherent ('abstract') forms and qualities of the artist's materials.
Read chose the terms in italics (his emphasis) as those most exact and convenient to indicate the four groups, and he links them to Jung's four function types as follows:
Realism = thinking
Superrealism = feeling
Expressionism = sensation
Constructivism = intuition
He indicates for each type distinctions based on Jung's general attitude types and defines objective (extraverted) and subjective (introverted) modes. This leads to eight different
Herbert Read, Education through Art, (London: Faber, 1943), 97.
79 approaches or attitudes. His model opens possibilities as much as it creates problems when trying to apply it to a particular research-creation project. In fact, it simply doesn't work (I tried), but it does help to show how complex (as well as limiting) it is trying to describe creative activity in general, let alone in an academic context. His descriptions mostly help to re-emphasize the importance of feeling (emotions), intuition and sensation
(the senses) in the making of art, besides and beyond thinking (the faculty of thought and reason) as ways to access the 'un-thought'. This is where the blurriness and ambiguity emerges when describing creative PhDs.
2.5 Academic Equivalence: At What Cost?
The question of equivalence is important to ensure that art practice is not considered an 'easy' route to doctoral status. One model of this (for people who are not familiar with the ideas of Herbert Read and his assertion that art is a laborious emotional and nervously demanding activity) was worked out in a Report of the Higher Education
Quality Council in the UK. In line with the other directives for practice-based artistic research mentioned above, the report defines these doctorates as "distinct in that significant aspects of the claim for doctoral characteristics of originality, mastery and contribution to the field, are held to be demonstrated through the original creative
Ibid., 97. For the original 1921 text titled "Psychological Types" by Carl G. Jung, see "Chapter X: General Description of the Types" In Psychological Types (1921), Classics in the History of Psychology. York University Internet Resource. Developed by Christopher D. Green. Translated by H. Godwyn Baynes (1923). http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jung/types.htm, (accessed 27 November, 2009). 31 One major problem I perceive is the linking of intuition to constructivism which is the most abstract and formalist form of art, while the term feeling seems a bit too general or too narrow for the category of superrealism (or surrealism).
80 work." Art historian Fiona Candlin, one of the few authors who has published on PhDs in Art and Design, points out some key problems with the assumptions and conclusions of this report. For instance, just as is the case in most programs, the report puts a lot of emphasis on the need for a written component, implicitly confirming that practice alone cannot independently demonstrate analysis and mastery of the subject on the level of a doctoral degree. This confirms the idea that only written research can provide (the jury) a basis for judgment of the originality of the work. For many, writing (words) is still seen as the only way to secure the meaning of an artwork or the intentions behind it:
Within the terms laid out by the UKCGE report, artwork, no matter how theoretically informed or critical it may be, does not function as research, it becomes research worthy only through the framing theoretical inquiry. In other words, an art practice, no matter how cognitively sophisticated and theoretically rich it is, or however much it enquires into and works through a set of ideas, cannot be deemed research without the supporting apparatus of conventionally presented academic study.33
Candlin is right about where the problem lies with this reasoning: the implicit idea that writing does not signify in itself, but only carries signification. In other words, the report omits that writing is also a form of creative practice and that the shape that the written part takes will also shape the outcome of the project. "In the report writing is perceived as being so naturalized that it is not recognized as having a form" while it is obvious that
"there is a particular style to academic writing as the numerous graduate self-help books testify."34 Moreover "the acquisition of writing skills is not only a matter of style but
Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC) Report, Survey of Awards in Eleven Universities (1997), 18. Cited in Fiona Candlin, "Practice-Based Doctorates and Questions of Academic Legitimacy." Journal of Art and Design Education 19, no. 1 (February, 2000): 98. 33 Candlin, "Practice-Based Doctorates", 98.
81 indexes and implicitly subscribes to academic codes and procedures." Candlin therefore argues that the UKCGE report, in its attempt to establish ways in which the practice- based doctorate can be deemed 'equivalent' to conventional doctorates, de facto utilizes the traditional distinction that opposes academic work to practice in general and to artwork specifically: it clearly maintains the divide between theory and practice, image and word:
While this is a common model in both academic and art circles it ignores both the practical elements of theoretical writing and the theoretical aspects of art practice. There is a long history of artists engaging with intellectual issues, concepts and philosophies, and of making artwork which is thoroughly engaged at a critical level. Clearly, these practices do not operate in isolation or in a separate sphere to theoretical debates but nor do artists rely on dissertations to make their point.36 (my emphasis)
Candlin nails the issue when she remarks that in fact the problem is not "how to squeeze art practice into the regulatory forms of academia", but rather that it is time to rethink what is meant by 'scholarly research' and 'academic practice' (see also Chapter 1). The impetus to rethink the territory of academia is not the sole territory of the fine arts. Other groups such as "feminist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial writers have critiqued the way in which particular forms of knowledge, ways of working and groups of people have been legitimated by academia while others have been dismissed."37 As Candlin concludes:
A practice-based PhD, whether or not it includes theoretical elements, will be different from a conventional one. Rather than making art practice as scholarly as possible, the practice-based PhD could be seen as an opportunity to re-think academic norms.
Fiona Candlin, "Practice-Based Doctorates", 99. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 101.
82 In another article Candlin situates her argument in a larger (art-)historical context and raises valid questions concerning the possibility to maintain a critical art agenda in academic institutions, especially in the light of recent conservative educational policies and market-oriented educational reforms. Rather cynically she argues that the social history, institutional critique, and cultural analysis (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu), that have been taught since the 1970s as different ways of re-thinking the boundaries of art and art history, have now become accepted as 'the new art history'. Candlin suggests that even works that integrate theory and practice are now commonplace (this may be true in
England, but this is obviously not the case everywhere). Candlin concludes that theoretical and social historical approaches became sufficiently common within art institutions to prompt some to write that the new art history has recently become the new orthodoxy—art as a carrier of social values: "Likewise 'radical' art practices have become increasingly mainstream."39
This echoes the complaints about path-dependence in film theory discussed in the first chapter, and provides an appropriate forewarning for the time when practice-based
PhDs become more common. To illustrate this Candlin refers to the history of conceptual art, which "rather than being concerned with a reduction or eradication of external issues attempted to be a critical investigation of them, specifically those considerations concerned with the discursive constitution of art."40 This was initially a strong example of how to integrate theory in studio practice, but now conceptualism has become the dominant mode. Therefore Candlin concludes that:
Candlin, "A Dual Inheritance", 305. Ibid.
83 While there may be individual practitioners, or even departments wherein the integration of theory and practice retains its critical agenda and is used to deconstruct the silent ideologies of modernism, theory and practice could be understood as having become another orthodoxy. Pessimistically, the practice based PhD could be conceived of as the formulaic version of its forebears; it maintains the form of theory and practice but has lost its original impetus. Rather than challenging the status quo it now upholds it.41
Although a rather bleak assessment of practice-based PhDs, it is difficult not to agree with Candlin. The question is if there is not some middle ground to be found, a (for lack of a better word) 'formula' that allows adherence both to the academic norm and creative originality and that allows one to think, write and create out of the box. This is what I tried with this project that, in its entirety is experimental but, for better or for worse, became a complex and varied project that combines both conventional and un conventional writing, with more or less un-conventional films. It is a compromise between experimenting with pure formal elements and keeping a strong critical and social engagement. Just as these two competing beliefs and practices can be voiced in the same studio or classroom, they can be part of the same person. Since this is by no means an easy route, I chose the creation of 'a memory of resistance' as both the focus and the framework for my thesis project because it allowed me to redirect myself when needed:
The memory of resistance is not a 'human memory', though its forces can be marshalled for all kinds of mobilizing narratives: alternative histories, or popular memory and countermemory in the Foucauldian sense. This memory is absolute because it is the barrier thought comes up against- forcing thought to call upon an absolute or infinite movement, the force of time as change, and to recognize the immanence or becomings that resist capitalism and restore life to modes of existence deadened by capitalism.42 (my emphasis)
41 Candlin, "A Dual Inheritance", 306. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, 206.
84 This thesis has been a valuable exercise in believing in the inventiveness of time, in the possibilities of change, in experimentation and in the many choices we have to do things differently within an academic context, even if that is not always obvious in the final product. Therefore I would like to end the debate about the possibility and credibility of practice-based PhDs by joining Fiona Candlin in her conclusion that a less polarized interpretation is possible:
The institutionalization of debates does not necessarily imply a simple assimilation and therefore eradication of all critical potential. Any process of assimilation or incorporation changes that which assimilates and here practice-based PhDs do have an effect upon the politics of knowledge within the institution. The inauguration of the practice-based PhD assumes that artwork counts as knowledge, as legitimate academic research. By crossing traditional academic boundaries, such as those between theory and practice, words and images, fact and fiction, the PhD becomes an active agent in changing the literal and conceptual construction of academic work. Ways of working and types of knowledge that have been excluded from the academic or artistic sphere are legitimated with the introduction of the practice-based PhD. As the heir of these feminist, conceptual and poststructuralist debates on theory and practice, the practice-based PhD starts to re-figure the boundaries of what knowledge is considered to be in the university. The major difference is that this happens from within the institution and not from an adversarial, apparently non co-opted position. 43 (my emphasis)
With this project I hope to have contributed in some way to the rethinking of the boundaries of what is considered to be academic knowledge and training in the university.
2.6 Research-Creation: Section Cinema
Film is a petrified fountain of thought. Jean Cocteau
43 Candlin, "A Dual Inheritance", 306.
85 The above debates are an interesting but a rather broad framework, and at this point it is necessary to make some distinctions and to clarify the particulars of this thesis.
Firstly, this is a thesis in (and about) film and I imply both that film is art (despite the fact that a lot of films produced are mere commodities) and that film is a form of writing.
Secondly, this dissertation is offered as a partial fulfilment of a degree in communication studies, not in fine arts. Although the latter is not a distinction that I make in my daily life, it is good to clarify that the approach taken here is in many ways also a compromise between the expectations of these two academic fields with their specific practices and histories. This, combined with the (at times strange) variety in my own film practice and my many interests in film as an object of study, makes for a thesis project that constantly moves in different directions and combines a variety of styles and disciplines: film history; the history of film technology; film preservation; cultural studies and philosophy for the written part; a combination of politics, poetics and playfulness for the creative part; and all applied to film as an 'objet trouve' (as found study object and as found- footage).
2.7 Film = Art (experimental film)
Within the context of a memory of resistance my choice was to make experimental films44. Experimental films, with hopes to advance film as art, constantly search for a new grammar: they resist the habitual repetition of trends and formulas, and carry cinema's past forward. Just by operating outside of the mainstream, resisting all forms of commerce and exchange, whether in the form of communication or that of
441 could also have opted for documentary, but experimental film gives me more freedom to play with multiple meanings and complex narratives, besides formal experiments.
86 commodities (in Deleuze's terminology), experimental film artists contribute to the necessary debate about the aesthetics and values of mainstream media, and those of society at large. It is therefore a very suitable field within which to do creative research. It is (usually) a genre that integrates social, cultural and aesthetic questions in both theory and practice. Not only are many experimental filmmakers also writers and critics, the films themselves are primarily appreciated and understood as being critical about the medium. Hence these films can be read as 'texts' about film besides being about other issues. Many texts dealing with the lurking death of film blame the impoverishment of the content of the 'seventh art' (the so-called decay of cinema: see Chapter 3). But the impoverishment they address concerns only 'the movies',45 and there is a lot more to film than just movies. There is a long history of alternatives and resistance to the dominance of Hollywood in film and how the industry limited the creative possibilities of cinema by turning it into a simply plotted, but spectacularly told, commodity product that goes hand-in-hand with Hollywood's constant deadening of audience consciousness. Part of my project as a 'memory of resistance' is to recall that this is why we have (and need) a cinema that provokes thought and offers insight about film and its workings: experimental film, and found-footage films in particular, offer the possibility to do this.
I make the distinction between film, cinema and movies based on what is commonly used in French film theory. Film for me is the most general term, which refers to the medium film in general. The filmic is that aspect of the medium that concerns its relationship with the world, such as in filmic time and filmic space (my main point of interest). Cinema refers to the art of filmmaking, and the cinematic entails the aesthetics and internal structure of the art. Movies refers to the function of film as an economic commodity. In short: Movies can be consumed. Cinema is art. Film is the most general (and most technical) term with the fewest connotations.
87 To be as Jean Cocteau would say, "petrified fountains of thought." Only, that is not easy to do, and not all attempts are successful.
To clarify my position about film as an art form and the choices I made for this project further, I want to remind the reader that (most) experimental films are (were) shot on 16mm and other small gauge film formats to reduce the production costs and allow the production itself to remain independent. Contrary to what the discourses about the death of film try to make us believe, it is in this field that the most dramatic changes are occurring, and not in the mainstream, since it is 16mm that is disappearing, a lot faster than 35mm. Besides, for mainstream narrative films it is not that important if the film is shot on film or high definition video. But for films that are in large part about using the material characteristics of the film medium itself as part of their (poetic) language-as in writing with light and movement-the disappearance of that photographic medium (or it becoming inaccessible or too expensive) has serious consequences: it makes keeping one's artistic and economic independence even more problematic. There is consequently a good reason to construct a memory of resistance against the death of film in this particular field of creative activity.
The questions are to what extent, and how, experimental film is transformed by the changed political and cultural climate of the past decades. How does artistic innovation translate in an era of widely accessible media where 16mm is no longer a medium of choice to work against the grain since it has been added to the scrapheap of history as just one more residual medium, a memory of the past? Can a project built with
16mm images still search and find new grammars, or can it only carry cinema's past
He mentioned this in an interview in Esquire magazine. The axiom has since taken on a life of its own: Jean Cocteau, "Interview." Esquire Magazine, February 1961.
88 forward into the future? Does the translation of 16mm into digital video automatically entail the loss of its aura or does it give the images a new fluidity? Can the combination of original 16mm images with digital editing techniques create a new field of tension that helps to explore and understand both mediums? Can working with old, found 16mm footage, especially from films that have been discarded not only by the industry47, but also by departments of film studies and art history, even by cultural history, in itself be an act of resistance, a step towards creating a counter-memory (counter-history)? Will reflecting on the ways in which the past is rewritten by technologies of history and memory provide a key for resisting the current social order?481 hope that in this context my project can be seen as a continuation of the tradition in experimental film to
call into question, largely through radical form—and to a lesser extent a radical content—the very nature of film in our society. To achieve this, a filmmaker may use film as an object rather than an instrument in order to speak as an individual consciousness and conscience. Such a film establishes a new kind of discourse, an explanatory discourse, perhaps even a dialectical discourse. In short, its end is epistemological.49
This is the core idea for this whole thesis; that films can act as meta-film, a meta- commentary on film and its function in the past, present and future, and this is particularly the case for found-footage films. These types of films—self-reflective and
I am referring to all films with a limited shelve life: Ephemeral cinema genres such as travelogues, B-movies, scientific films, government-sponsored service films (the precursors of public broadcast announcements), advertisements, industrial films and even 16mm screening copies of mainstream films, the bulk of which is sometimes coined as 'film junk'. Charles Tryon used this description in his analysis of Chris Marker's work as a memory of resistance. See: Chuck Tryon, "Letters from an Unknown Filmmaker: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory." Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 8 (Spring 2004) http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/tryon.htm (accessed 11 August, 2005), 2. 49 Chuck Kleinhans, "Reading and Thinking about the Avant-Garde." Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 2, (March-April 1974): 5.
89 self-critical—are both the object of my research and the objective of the creation part of my thesis. Besides a form of rewriting history, I see my work with found footage as a form of critical essay writing, and thus (more than pure abstract work) a natural component of an academic project.
2.8 Film = Essay-Writing (collage films)
Found-footage or collage films, a specific sub-genre of experimental film, build on a long tradition of collage in art. Collage art was a popular technique of Surrealism and Dadaism. Within a film context, found-footage films are often listed with compilation films and archival cinema; the use of stock footage; home-movies; and archival footage in fiction films and documentary. My practice is closer to the radical recontextualization of images (and sounds) from the 'avant-gardist tradition' (to use an incredible oxymoron). Besides its historical roots, it is as important to recognize that there is lot of renewed interest in this genre thanks to two practical reasons: the availability of huge amounts of discarded film material to work with, which is even made available for purchasing on the Internet (e.g. on eBay and Craigslist); as well as the availability of major key found-footage films on DVD (e.g. all the work of Craig
Baldwin) and on YouTube. But the new popularity of found-footage films can also be explained by the fact that these rather obscure 'avant-garde' found-footage films, share the same tactical approach as what Rodowick calls "the fundamental creative acts, or even automatisms, of the digital arts: synthesis, sampling and sequencing"5 . Of course, these creative acts of the digital arts are not limited to found-footage films: the last
Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 15.
90 twenty-five years have seen an exponential growth of many non-cinematic practices that extend this tradition into other arts and entertainment such as turntable scratching and digital video-mixing (VJ-ing). The latter, I would suggest, are more extensions of music videos, a genre that gained prominence in the 1980s. They have in common their reliance on rapid-fire editing as encouraged by the use of a remote control for TV or the point- and-click hyper-linking on the Internet. Collage films on the other hand work more with slowing images down and the repetition of images, which is meant to expose the
(televisual or cinematic) subtexts of the found shots and scenes.51 No matter the many technical and creative differences, all of these forms of image-and-sound-sampling have one thing in common: a general dismissal and violation of copyrights. The exaggerated, and at times absurd, regulations issued by the industry and governments trying to abort these creative practices and tactics would be an interesting research topic in itself, but I leave this to others. I simply do not worry about what I do in legal terms.
As said, I see my work as a continuation of the tradition of found-footage filmmaking that has existed in art and film since the first decades of the last century. This tradition has its roots in several early film practices: the formation of early stock-shot libraries and companies; specific ethnographic and scientific documentaries of the 1910s and 1920s; Soviet Montage cinema and more particularly the work of Esfir Shub ; even
Great recent examples of found-footage films that combine a the old-fashioned aesthetic of the images with intelligent uses of what digital techniques have to offer to create wonderfully imaginative samplings of Hollywood and mainstream TV culture, are the films of German filmmaker Matthias Muller (with Christopher Girardet) (see: http://www.fdk-berlin.de/en/arsenal-experimental/artists/matthias-mueller.html) and of Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold (see: http://www.rl2.at/arnold). 52 One of the first true found-footage filmmakers was Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub, co worker of Dziga Vertov and mother of the historical compilation film. For example in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) she used footage from the czarist's archives,
91 the opening of Louis Bunuel's L'Age D'Or (1930) with its appropriated images of scorpions. Beyond these possible roots of the 'genre' it is very difficult to construct a cohesive chronological history of found-footage films: it must suffice to recognise that it remained to play an important historical and political role as a counter-cultural practice.
What one can do - and this will help to situate my work - is, following William Wees, to discern three different streams of found-footage filmmaking, based on how the found images are used: the compilation film (documentary), collage films (avant-garde) and appropriation (music video). Wees links these three modes to three different aesthetic biases, notably realism, modernism and postmodernism, and to three different relationships created between the signifier and the signified: realism, image and simulacrum53. As Wees explains:
Compilation films may reinterpret images taken from film and television archives, but generally speaking, they do not challenge the representational nature of the images themselves. That is, they still operate on the assumption that there is a direct correspondence between the images and their filmic sources in the real world. [ ... ] [This while] the kinds of representation that compilation films tend to take for granted are precisely the kind collage films call into question.54
Using Bruce Conner's film A Movie (1958) as key example, Wees shows how collage films
not only call attention to the montage technique itself, but provoke a self- conscious and critical viewing of cinematic representations, especially when they are representations that were originally intended to be seen as unmediated signifiers of reality. [While] 'appropriation' also "capitalizes including their home movies. As Partricia Aufterheide states, "the czar's family would have been shocked to see records of their luxurious living juxtaposed to images of poverty and misery." Patricia Aufterheide, Documentary Film: a very short introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), 92. William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found-Footage Fimmaking (New York, Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 34. 54 Ibid., 36, 38.
92 on the manipulations of montage and the equivocal nature of cinematic representations, but it lacks the deconstructive strategies and critical point of view characteristic of collage films.55
Based on this typology, I think it is safe to say that all the work presented here as part of my research-creation project qualify as collage films.56
As Wees writes:
While collage is critical, appropriation is accommodating. Collage probes, highlights, contrasts; appropriation accepts, levels, homogenizes". [And] if collage is, as Gregory Ulmer has written, "the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation in our century", then appropriation is the movement that follows behind, profiting from the revolution without embracing or advancing its goals.57
This is for the most part why I work with collage to create my memory of resistance: it is a way to keep the memory of the revolutionary character in found-footage work alive, or to reinstate it during times when there is an abundance of non-critical culture jamming. But my 'choice' is as much inspired by the similarities between this kind of filmmaking and essay writing: short pieces of writing that present a personal point-of-view as an article or a short story. I see the films as a collection of essays,59 more of the story-kind with narrative structures in a personal style, to go with the
Wees, Recycled Images, 40. 56 The one exception is Double-Jump, still a collage film in intent, but clearly affected by the rock-and-roll aesthetic of culture jamming in music videos. Wees, Recycled Images, 47. CO This sounds more intentional than it was: I just continued to work as I have done before - be it that I always made this kind of work in conjunction with more poetic and abstract pieces - which is what I left aside for this thesis project. 59 Note that there is a genre in film called 'essay-film' which is not the same as what I present here, hence my insistence in the use of the term collage films. Essay films, such as the work of Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker and Anges Varda to name just the ones that I admire most and know best, are documentary films where the visual track is combined with a personal commentary.
93 collection of academic essays in this part of the thesis, which are characterized more by a descriptive, logical and factual writing.
2.9 Film = Writing (camera-stylo)
Increasingly this research-creation project has taken shape as an interweaving of creative writing with creative filmmaking. I have elaborated on ways to infuse the written part of the thesis with more creativity and inventiveness akin to the experimental character of the films made. However, the act of filmmaking in itself (regardless of which genre) can just as easily be considered a form of writing. The idea that film resembles a kind of writing is actually as old as the medium itself, be it that in this day and age when filmmaking tools are at hand for everyone, film is becoming the personal, flexible instrument of communication that Alexandre Astuc (under very different circumstances) called the 'camera-stylo' or camera-pen. In 1948 Astuc, a visionary and art critic, called for a new age of cinema which would be defined as "the age of camera-stylo". He predicted that
cinema would gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.
Astuc basically argued for a kind of film in which the director uses the camera personally and creatively, just as the writer uses his/her pen. Usually Astuc's idea is considered as the direct precursor of the French Nouvelle Vague (and the Auteur theory in film
James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia: Language, History, Theory. 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 409. Agnes Varda often uses the concept to describe her work as a filmmaker and also developed the term 'cine-ecriture'.
94 studies) but this idea of a more personal cinema, as personal as one's handwriting, lives on in many genres. Experimental films, as the envisioning of the subjective world of the filmmaker, are the type of films par excellence to be written with a 'camera-stylo'. But the idea of writing ideas directly on film was already made much more radically by the
Surrealists who also developed the technique of 'automatic' writing: writing without letting the words pass by the writer's consciousness. This method, as well as the fleeting character of both film and writing, is superbly shown in the 1969 film titled La Pluie
(projet pour un texte) by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. Broodthaers is filmed in his garden while writing a text in the rain. The text is never completed, since the pouring rain keeps washing away the ink62. In a manuscript for this tragicomic film Broodthaers states that he was "cruelly torn between something immobile that has already been written and the comic movement that animates 24 images per second." In other words, according to Eric de Bruyn this film embodies the idea that:
Cinema functions as a curious device of simultaneous inscription and erasure. It formed an invention of a technological age that was both
Broodthaers possibly made the only film that perfectly embodies what Helene Cixous coined 'ecriture feminine': a feminine practice of writing. Cixous urged women to put themselves the un-thought and the un-thinkable into words. Ecriture feminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing. It is therefore also impossible to define, and "this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system". See: Helene Cixous "Laugh of the Medusa." in The Continental Ethics Reader, edited by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton, 276-284. (New York: Routledge, 2003). An interesting detail is that, although she did not see this as a possibility for only women, because it many references to the female body Cixous' ecriture feminine was also coined as 'white ink' (as in mother milk). The effect of writing with white ink on a white sheet is similar to writing in the rain with water-soluble ink. 63 Cited in Eric de Bruyn, "Das Museum Der Attraktionen: Marcel Broodthaers Und Die Section Cinema." Medien KunstNetz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themen/kunst undjdnematografie/broodthaers/l/ (accessed 28 December, 2008), 1.
95 stillborn and still remained to be born. We are asked to consider cinema as project, therefore, and not as projection.65
This adds yet another interesting component to my project to build a memory of resistance for (and from) film: we need to consider cinema as an invention of a technological age that still remains to be born, thus it can still be invented (and re invented), and times of technological change provide excellent opportunities to do so.
Another good reason to return to the work and ideas of Marcel Broodthaers is that he also resisted the cinema of 'narrative absorption'. He was suspicious of the diegetic universe of classical cinema, with its unity of word and image since it offers a vision of spatial totality (Hollywood's continuity system).
The spatialized logic of classical cinema, after all, mimics the universal structure of the commodity—a structure that Broodthaers advises undergrids the cultural field as a whole. "If we are concerned with reification, then Art is a particular representation of the phenomenon—a form of tautology."66
Broodthaers's cinema was part of his personal crusade against commodification in the cultural sphere; the growing resemblance of cinema to publicity; the selling of ideas-also in conceptual art-as commodities; and how ideas are quickly absorbed or rejected in what he called "a documentary of received ideas."67 For him the only effective way to maintain a critical distance is to be conscious about how to write with film:
The idea that film was stillborn (hence still to be born?) comes back also in other texts, notably those that recall that Antoine Lumiere already announced that cinema had no future (see Chapter 3). 65 de Bruyn, "Das Museum Der Attraktionen", 1. 66 Ibid. The original phrase is: "Aussi dans certains aspects du conceptual Art, souvent le film est un intermediaire banal ou l'idee joue le role principal du sujet. Mais le sujet n'est-il pas reduit par cette platitude du style de transmission, sinon absorbe et rejete dans un
96 Broodthaers cinema resembles the intertextual nature of an ecriture as theorized by Barthes. His films range across genres of narrative, documentary and experimental film without, finally, fitting into any single category and individual films are often submitted to a process of recombination and recycling.69
This is obviously another connection between Broodthaers's and my work: I also reused images that have already figured in other films. It is also a welcome reconnection with my Belgian past and its particular artistic culture. Broodthaers followed in the footsteps of another great Surrealist artist, his friend the painter Rene Magritte. In a 1987 article about Magritte he stated that "Magritte aimed at the development of a poetic language to undermine that upon which we depend."70 He is referring to Magritte's play with everyday language. Broodthaers himself was more concerned with deconstructing forms of commercial language, such as the language of cinema and especially the persuasive and slogan-esque talk in publicity that he saw at work everywhere in late capitalism
(hence the importance of his legacy for my thesis project). Broodthaers and Magritte
documentaire des idees recues, parfois original?" Cited in de Bruyn, "Das Museum Der Attraktionen", 7. The fact that Broodthaers added "at times original" suggests that in rare cases he considers conceptual art a method to regain critical ground. 68 Ecriture as defined by Barthes in his book Le Degree Zero de L 'Ecriture (1953), refers to the fact that blank or neutral writing is an illusion, in other words: all writing has some style or discourse that shapes our view of the world. See also above the statements about academic writing and how that is constructed according to a certain style. Ecriture Feminine was a movement of the 1970s based on the idea that writing is not a neutral medium, and hence it is (or can be used as) an instrument of patriarchal expression. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. (London: J. Cape, 1967). See also: Helene Cixous mentioned above, but also Luce Irrigaray, Rosi Braidotti and Julia Kristeva who are founding writers/theorists of this movement. 69 de Bruyn, "Das Museum Der Attraktionen", 2. 70 Marcel Broodthaers, "Gare Au Defi\ Pop Art, Jim Dine, and the Influence of Rene Magritte." October 42, (Fall 1987): 34.
97 disagreed on this and Magritte found that the young artist was too much a sociologist. I actually see with Broodthaers the need to be critical, especially of commercial language such as mainstream cinema, and I admire his inventive ways of constructing a critique of contemporary art. I will therefore return to Broodthaers project titled Section Cinema, which was part of his well-known fictional museum called 'Musee d'Art Moderne,
Departement des Aigles' in my conclusion.
2.10 Conclusion: a Guide for How to Read this Thesis
I hope by now to have established the boundaries and complexities of the framework within which I situate this project: in short it is a critical reflection on what is going on in film studies and film production, as a collage of texts that goes hand-in-hand with a series of collage films. At the centre are all the debates about the current 'death of film' which I see as various fireworks ignited by the sparks that fly from the new flashy digital technologies, fireworks so powerful that many are blinded by their effects (both the promotion of the technology and the raging debates), with as a consequence more trashing of small films, the obscuring of small film histories and a disappearance of small independent film practices. Hence this project became more and more a kind of creative
'rescue operation', one that required quite a bit of erratic travel into the danger zones of film history and theory, cultural studies, the workplaces of film preservation, and into the
(sometimes) snobbish palaces of film art. The impetus for the entire project was to resist the capitalist logic that promotes digital video as a necessary replacement for film, but not to resist the technology itself. Rather I sought to use it creatively and explore it as
71 Broodthaers, "GareAu DefiV\ 34.
98 another tool at hand to make work with analogue images found on treasure hunts into pawnshops, film labs and garbage fields.
If there are many twists and turns in this work that is because it follows in part the twists and turns of three years of mental collage work with a huge variety of texts. As for the possible ambiguity that this creates in the reader's mind, I cannot offer any help, and nor do I want to. But I do want to emphasize one thing that is truly essential to understanding this research-creation project: the text can only be read and understood as the twin part of the film series. The strange thing is the films are a healthy and lively
'brainchild' and they can easily live on their own; yet the written part of the thesis without the films is an amputated conjoined twin and thus not really viable. This will become even more obvious in the next two chapters where the literary research and the creative research truly go hand-in-hand. From now on text and film will happily crawl together over the cemetery (one could say 'cinematery') of film, finding that it is a great playground for collage fanatics of all kinds. To make the two parts conjoin was by far the most difficult part of this thesis. Whether this joining works is up to the reader to decide, but at the very least I hope to have shown that research-creation works as a PhD thesis.
99 CHAPTER 3: THE DECAYING ART OF FILM
Le cinema est mort, vive le cinema. (Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mepris 1963).
3.1 Introduction: the A and B Rolls of my Research
A and B rolls are two rolls of film of the same length used for A and B printing, a method of 16mm film printing that allows for special effects without the necessity of costly optical processes and which avoids the appearance of splices on the screen. The shots are arranged in alternate spaces on two rolls of film (A and B), with black leader between the shots on each roll so that the shots on one film correspond with black leader on the other. The odd-number shots on the A roll and the even-numbered shots on the B roll are printed in consecutive order, allowing various transitions such as fades, dissolves, superimpositions, etc...I use this editing technique as a metaphor for this third chapter, which integrates the results of literary research and one part of the practical research, the slug-film videos. Although separated in two parts in print, the idea is that the A and B roll of my project will be joined in the mind of the reader, like the two parts of a zipper, or with the proper film term, like a checkerboard edit.1
In what follows, I want to explore the ongoing debate about the so-called 'death of film,' which seems often to be interpreted as the decay of cinema, by listing a series of propositions I encountered in the literature (the A roll). This is a cluster of topics that are
1 Note that I don't use the term B-roll as it is also commonly referred to in documentary, namely as secondary footage to cover up awkward camera movements etc.... (also known as cutaways), nor as the B-roll news-footage broadcasters use free of charge for their reportages (also known as stock footage).
100 of particular interest to me as a filmmaker, and they have been chosen because they stood out and remained pertinent during the four years that I have been reading about the topic.
More specifically, they are all more or less relevant in relation to the creative work that I have been making and they were at times the inspiration for it (the B roll) or vice versa.
Besides a lot of pessimism, the debate about the 'death of film' is characterized by complexity and confusion about some key terms. I therefore decided to work out a collage of ideas to go with my collages of images. This seemed an appropriate method to structure this chapter, which is grounded more in cultural studies, dealing with issues of technology and society, than strictly in film studies.
The idea to write this overview of the literature more as a series of ideas or arguments is not exceptional or original. Wheeler Winston Dixon wrote the conclusion to a reader titled The End of American Cinema as We Know it (2002) as a list of "Twenty- five reasons why it is all over."2 Paolo Cherchi Usai's book about The Death of Cinema:
History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (2001), in which he reflects on the first centennial of film in view of eternity, is a collection of one hundred "thoughts about fragments presented as fragments of thought" (book cover).3 Usai's book is interesting because its philosophy evolves directly from the physical properties of film, which is at the core of all my work. Last, but not least, the Surrealists often worked with lists and collections of fragments to reflect on the state of things.
2 Wheeler Winston Dixon, "Twenty-Five Reasons Why it's all Over" in The End of Cinema as we Know it: American Film in the Nineties, edited by Jon Lewis, (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 356-366. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001).
101 For me, this method simply allows me to make an inventory of issues worth listing: ideas and topics of historical importance. Secondly, it also forces me to think in a linear structure (to follow a path) but it does so without having to choose just one line of thought (I can choose two or more possibilities when confronted with bifurcating paths).
Thirdly, it also helps to limit the lists of issues, which is a necessity since I am dealing with a debate that has been ongoing for over a decade now. Hence I use the A and B rolls to assemble the various results of my fieldwork in a framework that is written as a dialogue between two discourses: one for the scholar and one for the artist. These two discourses obviously overlap, but they also complement each other, and divert from each other; while at times there is a fruitful dialogue between the two discourses, at other times there is also a disconnect happening that proves how the two belong to very different frames of thought.
Such is the world of the artist-scholar: a constant internal dialogue in two different languages; a constant translation and trans-coding between two alphabets
(comparable to working with the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters) between verbal and non-verbal communication; between letters and figures; or, as is also the case here, working between analogue film frames and digital codes. Because I often got lost in translation trying to tackle the (at times absurd) debates about the 'virtual menace' of digital technology and the disappearance of film, once more enlisting with the Surrealists seemed like an apt solution. Following in their footsteps, the two parts of this chapter are concluded with two manifestos: one with my thoughts about the afterlife for film, and one as a true collage with images and sound. They both function as 'a memory of resistance'.
102 A-ROLL: AFTERTHOUGHTS4
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together. Jean-Luc Godard. B-ROLL: AFTERIMAGES
A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end... but not necessarily in that order. Jean-Luc Godard.
A-ROLL: Early Prognoses about the 'Death of Film': Confusion and Pessimism.
A good introduction to the various ideas that circulate about the 'death of film' is
Godfrey Cheshire's often cited 1999 New York Press article "The Death of Film/The
Decay of Cinema"5. As he states himself, up to that moment
there were very few articles "concerning the enormous changes about to occur in our media environment. Of course, there is one reason those articles may be so scarce: at the moment, most media companies are far less interested in publicizing the impending changes than they are in positioning themselves to take advantage of them."6
Major parts of the first section of this chapter are from my key-note lecture for the Colloquium "Is Film Dead?" organized by the Atlantic Film Makers Cooperative in March 2007. This text, revised and shortened, was published as "Film: Another Death, another Life." Incite! Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics 1, no. 1 (Fall, 2008): 20-32. 5 Cheshire, who served as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle is an award- winning film critic and journalist whose writings on film have appeared in numerous national and international publications. His areas of special interest include Southern and American independent filmmaking, International films (he was responsible for introducing films from Iran and China to the US) and the conversion to digital cinema. His 1999 essay "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema" gained international attention and led to several events including a "Millennial Symposium" to discuss his ideas on the take over by digital cinema at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as special panels at the Sundance and Seattle film festivals. See: Godfrey Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema." New York Press 12, no. 34 (August 26th, 1999). 6 Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema."
103 Since those days, a lot has happened, but as he predicted not many calls for resistance were heard. Few authors actually write about the consequences for film production (even less about the consequences for experimental film) of digital technology. Most tackle how cinema and the movies will change (have changed), sometimes for better but usually for worse. Some authors acknowledge the practical educational advantages of having access to films on DVD that before were almost impossible to obtain. Film and media studies professors now use DVDs as source material and no longer use 16mm screening copies. It is very easy to use DVDs for preparing film clips and integrating them in lectures and/or course packs, even if one needs to bypass all kinds of technological protection measures (which is actually not difficult to do).7 Many 16mm screening copies of films from universities, public libraries or small independent theatres end(ed) up on the scrap heap: a gold mine for found-footage filmmakers.8
B-ROLL: Double Identity9 (digital video, 3min 43s)
Double Identity is one of four slug-film videos. It is a piece that reflects on the changes in film production and film studies thanks to digital technologies (when applied in film restoration to re-master films in high-definition for example). Playing on the themes of Michelangelo Antonioni's Passenger {Professione: Reporter) (1975) in which a burned-out journalist (Jack Nicholson) takes on the identity of a dead man, Double
Identity exposes the current double identity of many films: an original (often not so
7 William Fisher and Jacqueline Harlow. "Film and Media Studies and the Law of the DVD." Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (Spring, 2006): 119. 8 As part of my ongoing orphan film project, in the summer of 2008 I recovered forty- four 16mm film prints that were dumped by the North York Public Library. 9 On the DVD there is a trailer for this piece offered as a bonus track.
104 glamorous) filmic existence on celluloid and a new identity as a digital file (often after being restored). The original footage used in Double Identity is 16mm slug film made of an old faded screening copy of the film Passenger.
Slug film used to be made by film labs of duplicate copies of commercial films on
16mm that had had their best days in small independent theatres. After retrieving these copies, the lab made them 'unusable' by scratching the image midway through and then sold the films as slug film at negligible prices. The practice to scratch the images in the middle (stripping the films in the middle of about a three millimetre strip of information) was common practice to make sure the images could no longer be used for projection or to be optically copied. Working with slug or fill film is, to a large extent, a lost and forgotten practice because it belongs to the technique of cutting film and sound tracks on flatbed editing machines,10 which has been almost completely replaced by editing on computer. In any computer-editing program this method is simply copied: it allows you to insert 'slug' by a click of the mouse. Slug (or fill) is a 'blank' picture without sound, to fill the spaces where there are, usually temporarily, no images or sound; places where the film needs a short break or breather; or to facilitate editing A and B rolls together.
In sound, which when edited on a flatbed is cut on 16mm magnetic film, slug is used where silence is needed.-The editor uses strips of 16mm images, because over time blank magnetic sound film picks up dust and that will gradually become a (rather noisy)
This is a table equipped for editing that in many instanced replaced the (older) upright Moviola machines. The company Steenbeck produces most flatbeds, which is how they are also called. With as many as eight plates, they allow any combination with up to four pictures and four magnetic sound tracks to be run at once. The film and the sound runs horizontally, while the image itself is projected on a small translucent screen. These machines treat the film more gently than the Moviola, allowing one to handle the film with greater speed and ease and to create more accurate sound.
105 sound track in itself. This is the original purpose of the scratched images.'' Black leader and magnetic film are more costly than slug film, so there is also an economic reason to use slug film.
This is how I obtained the last reel of Passenger: it was hidden in a batch of duly scratched 16mm slug film I bought a couple of years ago. Instead of cutting it into a sound track, I decided to transfer the images to digital video and use them in this series of videos about the afterlife of film. In Double Identity, I use the scene in which the main character David Locke (played by Jack Nicholson) has lost all hope and faith in life because he knows that his new-found identity came at a fateful price (he is hunted by the agents of an African government for his involvement in the arms trade). In his hotel room, Locke tells the girl who ran away with him (Maria Schneider) the story about a blind man whose sight was restored, only to discover the ugliness of the world. In my version, he has this conversation with his digital alter ego at the other side of the scratch who is living his new life as a clean restored digital video copy (which was released only in April of 2006). At the end of the scene, Maria Schneider takes her place back in the film, just in time to walk out of the room, have a silent dialogue with her digital alter-ego, and then walk into the scratch unaware of her unavoidable dissolution, crushed in between two image worlds.
Double Identity shows the fate of many 16mm prints of Hollywood classics and
European art films. Some are actually still in circulation and are bought and sold by
Filmmakers use any dumped film to cut in sound tracks, not just the scratched copies that one can obtain from the lab. For example, I found snippets of the 1964 CBC documentary A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock (dir. Fletcher Markle) in a trim bin at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. I optically reprinted the images and used them in Struggling in Paradise (2004) and re-used one shot also in Stardust (2009).
106 collectors through publications such as The Big Reel and Classic Images. These transactions have mostly moved onto the Internet where there is an active community of people interested in 16mm copies of films.13 Double Identity is also meant as a comment on how showing film classics in the classroom has changed since most films of the film studies canon are reissued on DVD with far better images and sound than the old 16mm educational prints. "Arguing that 16mm is film and DVD is not seems increasingly pointless since DVD projection of classic 35mm films is often the visual equal of most
16mm projection of the same films and is usually far superior in terms of sound."14
Another motivation for this piece and the other slug-film videos, is to expose how some film practices, such as flatbed editing, have disappeared or changed dramatically with the arrival of digital technology: a topic that in the literature about the so-called 'death of film' is overshadowed by the concern of most authors for the effects on the content of films.
Jan-Christopher Horak, "Archiving, Preserving, Screening 16mm." Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (Spring, 2006), 115. (A special issue about "The Death of 16mm?") Both the magazines mentioned are not as active anymore in selling prints since most activity has moved online. 13 Many of these sites provide old films as stock footage (at rather expensive rates): See for example: http://grapevinevideo.com (part of Classic Images); or http://www.classicimg.com/frameset.html. One site that lists many films, more industrial and educational films, which are all part of the public domain and can be downloaded for free is The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public: see http://www.archive.org/index.php All websites mentioned are American. For a European example, see the collections of all the major European film institutions at http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/ (this is for educational use only). 14 Scott MacDonald "16mm: Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated" in Cinema Journal Vol. 45, no. 3, Spring 2006, 125.
107 A-ROLL: The 'Death of Film', the Decay of Cinema: More Pessimism
One of the difficulties in trying to untangle the debates about the 'death of film', was the fact that it is constantly linked to the decay of cinema (as is the case in Cheshire's article15), which seems to enhance both the pessimism about digital technology and the nostalgia for film. Another problem I encountered was that most authors used film, cinema and movies interchangeably, as is common in daily language. To avoid confusion or create false expectations about the scope of my project, I will first clarify the difference and overlap between these three terms.
'Film' refers first and foremost to the medium itself: a strip of thin, transparent, and flexible material, composed of a (cellulose nitrate or acetate) base supporting a layer of emulsion in which a latent image is formed upon exposure to light through a camera's lens. Hence the 'filmic' refers to those specific aspects of the cinema that concern its technical qualities - most often discussed in relation to reality. This is similar to the use of the term 'pictures'. This is what (in my belief) the 'death of film' should refer to: the demise of celluloid. But 'film' is also the most general and neutral term referring to any kind of motion picture, the entire medium, or all motion pictures collectively. This is where a lot of the confusion comes from: the recurrent link with the decay of cinema as the decline in quality of the films produced or the erosion of film as art. This would not happen if the difference between 'film' and 'cinema' was better known, and better observed. While cinema also refers to motion pictures as a group (the term comes from the Greek word 'kinema' meaning motion) it does so specifically as art form: 'cinema' has come to stand for the aesthetics and internal structure of the art of film and for film as
15 Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema".
108 art. 'Movies' (short for 'moving pictures') on the other hand, refer to film's function as an economic commodity: a consumable, popular, entertainment product.
With regards to 'the movies', most media companies have switched over to digital technology in production, and especially promote the replacement of film in theatres.
Robert Ebert, who already at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival sounded the alarm about what we could miss with the loss of celluloid in theatres, is concerned about how this new technological revolution was been rushed into place without the industry having conducted (or made public) any studies about possible effects, especially on a psychological level. He referred to data indicating that film creates a beta state of alert reverie in the brain, where TV provokes an alpha state of passive suggestibility. "Is it possible, Ebert wondered, that the subliminal catnip that people value in movies is been thrown out with the celluloid, and that audiences will soon abandon digital movies because they are too much like TV?"17 Besides this attempt to temper the 'digi-hype', as
Cheshire predicted, the switching-over to digital theatres did not get much media attention, and only "of the gee-whiz, isn't technology-amazing variety so beloved of entertainment writers, scoop-hungry editors and, presumably, gadget-loving
Americans"18, not about what the difference between seeing a film projected in pixels rather than as a series of flickering frames really means (for better or for worse).
16 I follow here more or less the definitions of James Monaco in How to Read a Film, 228-229. 17 Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema", 4. 18 Ibid., 3.
109 B-ROLL: Stargate (HD Video, lOmin 37s)
This film is almost entirely made with digital still images of dumped 16mm film in the
Ryerson film lab before the school was closed for renovations. Close-up images of the recycling bins full of 16mm film in various sparkling colours are subjected to digital effects (slit-scan and slit-tunnel) to create a psychedelic transgression through this analogue universe of 'dead' film similar to the key scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A
Space Odyssey, in part four: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. I used the same music and some brief images of Dave from the original film, so that my film resembles the original even more, but it amazed me how just applying some of the effects that Kubrick used, immediately created very similar images for the space shots. This probably is the case because my original footage of celluloid strips in blue bins is, even initially, rather abstract and colourful. Yet, one can still recognize sprocket holes and even numbers from the count-down flying by through space. At a key moment, this trip moves into digital space, with extreme close-up images (in High Definition video) of a large digital screen situated on Dundas Square. Originally I was going to leave these images as is, but when I tried applying the slit-scan and slit-tunnel effects to these images as well, it was too nice not to adopt. It was like I had landed in a Jordan Belson film. Besides using images of dumped film, the work is completely tied to the 'death of film' by its teleportation of the failing computer Hal from 2001 to 2010: this is obviously a very different film universe, and he has degenerated into empty film reels and film cans. Dave has no choice but to go on an odyssey through over-floating film recycling bins and scary digital screens. In the end he comes back to reality in a suspicious space called 'movies'.
110 A-ROLL: More (Past) Prognoses
Cheshire makes a similar distinction between film, cinema and movies, and had a rather pessimistic prognoses for all three of them about a decade ago:
Film refers to the traditional technology of motion pictures: the cameras, projectors, celluloid, lights and other gear that have been responsible for every movie you have seen in a theatre. Prognosis: sudden death. In a very short amount of time, film in theatres will disappear, replaced by digital projection systems and, soon enough, by productions that don't involve celluloid even at the shooting stage. This transformation will effectively mean that a medium that has been ubiquitous in the 20l century basically won't exist beyond the first few years of the 21st.
Movies here refers to motion pictures as entertainment. You know— movies. Everyone loves movies. Prognosis: forced mutation. For one thing, movies will no longer be the dominant attractions at movie theatres; they'll have lots of noisy competition. They'll also be heavily affected by the technologies that succeed film, namely television and computers. Movies are forever, basically, but movies after the 20l century will have neither the aesthetic singularity nor the cultural centrality that they presently enjoy.
Cinema refers to movies understood (and practiced) as an art. The cream of the medium's expressive history has generally equated with the excellence of individual creators, from Chaplin and Keaton to Fassbinder and Kiarostami. Prognosis: rapid decay. Cinema reached its point of maximal definition a couple of decades back, and has been slowly dissipating as a cultural force since. The end of film will help fasten cinema toward past-tense museum status—where it will 'thrive' in the way Renaissance painting now does.19 (my emphasis)
Cheshire's three scenarios resonate with the writings of Wheeler Winston Dixon and
Daniel Rodowick, namely how the 'digital revolution' will/has affect(ed) the movies, change(d) cinema and kill(ed) film. In 2000, Dixon declared that 16mm as a production medium was already dead and that "35mm may well follow within the next ten to fifteen
19 Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema", 2-3.
Ill years, signalling a significant shift in the production and reception process of that which we call the cinema."20 He continues:
In the early years of the twenty-first century, I argue, we will finally do away with film altogether, replacing it with a high-definition matrix of dots and pixels laser-projected onto a conventional theatre screen, and audiences will overwhelmingly accept this transformation without comment. The cinematograph, after all, is essentially an extension of the Magic Lantern apparatus—light thrown on a screen—and it has had dominion over the entire twentieth century. Now, in the new millennium, different images of image storage and retrieval will replace the allure of film as surely as magnetic tape replaced optical soundtracks as a vehicle of cinema production.21
It is interesting that he uses one of the changes in the technology of film sound, namely the use of magnetic tape to replace the optical signal,22 as an image for the transition from analogue to digital images. since that change was not really revolutionary. It was just a technical improvement replacing one analogue medium by another, and it was also not a transition that most audiences noticed. A recurrent
'complaint' is that the recent changes happened without audiences reacting or media writing about it, in other words, without a public debate. Audiences also didn't seem to
Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image. The SUNY Series, Cultural Studies in cinema/video. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), xi. 21 Wheeler Winston Dixon, Second Century of Cinema, xii-xiii. 22 Optical sound recorders were used up to the 1950s. They recorded light that modulated with sound in various intensities or widths (depending on the system) so that it could be printed next to the image. This system was used from the late 1920s until the 1950s when magnetic tape became the preferred means to record sound for film. Until recently all sound tracks were still printed optically on the final release copies of film, but with the movie theatres switching over to digital at a fast rate, this is also a disappearing technology. It is already not possible anymore to get a 16mm optical track printed in Canada. 23 Note that most digital technology has copied icons and sounds from analogue technology, such as the "click" of digital photo-cameras (while there is no reason for it to "click" since there is no mirror) or the many film sites that use sprocket holes for images that were produced digitally.
112 take notice of the 'rapid decay' of cinema that many authors complained about, usually referring to TV and video as the main culprits for the steady decline in film's economic position, cultural significance and aesthetic value,24 or blaming the film industry itself for a lack of inventiveness, only capable of rehashing tried and tired formulas.
In "Twenty-five reasons why it is all over" Dixon summarizes all the popular examples used to argue for 'the end of cinema': films are now composed for TV screens rather than cinema screens "leading to a barrage of flat, un-involving visuals" (reason
#10); MTV editing (shot-fragments) has become the rule for dramas and action films
(reason #12); "films have become solely driven by marketing and linear narrative content" (reason #13); "we are experiencing the 'Oprahfication' of contemporary consumer culture, and the hegemony of false consensus" (reason #16); "contemporary cinema 'strip-mines' its past with feverish ferocity (reason #19); while "classical film production methodology has collapsed" (reason #21)."25 The fact that the market-driven industry is in part responsible for the decay of cinema, for example by producing re makes that can never be as good as the original, is a recurrent argument. Hollywood is thus often accused of lacking creativity and passion to create something new and of using
For Peter Greenaway for example cinema died on the 3 Is of September 1983 when the zapper (or remote control) was introduced into the living-rooms of worldwide audiences. Greenaway actually heralds the power the zapper gives to audiences to determine their own viewing experience of a film, with the possibilities to fast forward, backward, replay, and freeze the images. I personally don't consider the invention of the zapper an instance that contributed to the 'death of film', it was only a change in film consumption, and it was mostly a TV moment, not a filmic event. See: Peter Greenaway. "Cinema Militants Lecture: Towards a Re-Invention of Cinema (September 28, 2003)." http://petergreenaway.org.uk/essay3.htm (accessed July 12, 2006). Not to be confused with his "Cinema Militants Lecture: Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be left merely to the storytellers - or: Five Imaginary Dutch Films" which dates from 1988, published on the same website. 25 Dixon, "Twenty-five reasons why it is all over", 356-366.
113 the history of film as only a pool of ideas for re-makes. None of the authors actually mention that the film industry is also producing parodies of its tried and tired genres and is able to poke fun at its own lack of intelligent plots. Moreover, despite tight copyright rules and tactics, the industry unknowingly hands independent filmmakers the creative tools to expose the 'decay of mainstream cinema' with small alternative spoofs.
B-ROLL: Double Shot (digital video, 5min 13s)
Double Shot is the first slug-film video with a new kind of slug film. There are no longer many (I suspect even any) 16mm screening copies of cinematic masterworks available since most small independent theatres don't continue to screen 16mm prints. If they haven't folded, they all now show 35mm copies that are getting a second or third round, or copies of art films borrowed from Cinematheques. It has therefore become impossible for the labs to make slug film by simply scratching discarded 16mm films.
Now 16mm slug film is made by cutting test runs of 35mm copies in half, and by printing extra sprocket holes so that it can be played as 16mm. Obviously, in their logic, this is enough to make it 'useless' as an image: the images miss fifty percent of the frame left or right; and they alternate between the bottom and the top half of the frame (one 35mm frame makes two 16mm frames) which creates a rather harsh jumping effect. In most cases, the images are also distorted because they are supposed to be projected through an anamorphic lens that can un-squeeze the image and make it a full frame 70mm image for wide-screen projection. For the industry, this is a useless image. For me, it was a gift.
Double Shot is made with such 16mm slug film. Since this basically creates two images (even if they are only half) out of one, I titled all these slug-film videos 'double
114 something', referring to their doubled images. Double Shot is a 'remake' of a film that is itself already a parody, namely the 1993 film Hot Shots: Part Deux! - a spoof on Rambo- style action films about a rescue operation in Iraq. This is basically a sequel to the first
Hot Shots! (1991) a parody of Top Gun (1986). In this film, CIA agent Topper was given the mission to destroy all Saddam Hussein's nuclear plants. In Hot Shots: Part Deux! the
CIA asks Topper Harley again to lead a mission into Iraq, this time to rescue the last rescue team, who went in to rescue the last rescue team who...who went in to rescue hostages left behind after Desert Storm. All along they shoot as many Iraqis as they can, since this is a comical re-interpretation of all the big shoot-'em-up commando type movies.
While the two Hot Shots! films were made around the time or shortly after the end of the first war in Iraq, Double Shot is made in the aftermath of the second invasion of
Iraq, which influenced the content of this video. The piece gets most of its political meaning from the soundtrack by Peter Lester26. Because of the nature of these double images, it was not easy to find or create a soundtrack that goes with (the lack of) flow without taking over, while being dynamic enough to complement them. Peter's piece is made with various invented sounds (loops, sound effects, some lines from the TV series
Rome etc..) that are a great match with the images. It.was only a question of building a narrative with the images so that they follow the drive of the sound piece. The last images are meant to mimic the cowboy at the end of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first
(violent) film directly addressing the audience by pointing a gun at them, asking if they
Peter has also made the sound-track for my first found-footage film Struggling in Paradise (2004).
115 'yes or no' want this war... and by extension maybe also if 'yes or no' do they want more of this type of film?
A-ROLL: The Rapid Decay of Cinema and 'Cinephilia'
In her famous 1996 article "The Decay of Cinema" Susan Sontag lamented cinema's decline as a powerful cultural force, stating that it gradually morphed into a
'decadent art'27. Musing on the first hundred years of cinema, which she interestingly described as a life cycle —' "with an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories, and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline" - she is as critical about the state of the art at the end of cinema's first century as Cheshire and Dixon:
While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a- kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmaking, a brazen combinatory or re-combinatory art , in the hope of reproducing past successes. Every film that hopes to reach the largest possible audience is designed as some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the twentieth century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.
Sontag's main explanation is actually that it is perhaps not cinema, but
'cinephilia' that has ended: "the name of the distinctive kind of love that cinema inspired". She explains:
Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and
I want to point out that although Sontag uses the term cinema, she is lamenting the state of movies. She is obviously not referring to the art and politics of found-footage films that recombine images from the mainstream to expose its formulas and conventions as a form of social critique. 29 Susan Sontag, "The Decay of Cinema", in New York Times, February 25, 1996,1. Republished as "A Century of Cinema" in Where the Stress Falls: Essays. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), 2001, 117 - 122.
116 mysterious and erotic and moral - all that at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like a religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.30
With the latter Sontag basically describes how film as a language is able to bridge the gap between 'art for art's sake' and 'art for life's sake', and this from its very origins. She describes how cinema began in wonder with the experience of seeing reality as it is (the
Lumiere Brothers) and cinema as illusion, invention, fantasy, artifice (George Melies), which were both fantastic experiences and as such not in opposition (as it is often described in traditional film history books). All that followed was an attempt to perpetuate and reinvent that sense of wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy in film. According to Sontag, it is this initial love for cinema that has waned:
Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the remake of Godard's Breathless cannot be as good as the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial films.31
For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films too. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated. If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead, too... no matter how many movies, even good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.
30 Susan Sontag. "The Decay of Cinema" in The New York Times, February 25th, 1996. Accessed through Proquest Historical Newspapers March 10th, 2006, 1. 31 Ibid., 2. 32 Ibid.
117 What Sontag suggests here is that films don't matter in our culture the way they did in the 1960s and 1970s. Not, that great films are no longer being made, but that the attitude towards film, that special sense of wonder, has disappeared. As we know from her earlier work, most notably her famous essay "Against Interpretation" (1961),
Sontag tried hard to nurture and educate our 'cinephilia', by warning us that searching for meaning, the critical act of interpretation, indicates a refusal to acknowledge and engage with the pure and manifest power of a work of art, in this case of a film. The search for meaning replaces the aesthetic experience of the film itself. Her own refusal to take her sensory experience of film (or art in general) for granted, and her attention to the aesthetic experience of film (film form over content) allowed her to see more, hear more, feel more. And she never stopped prompting us to do so as well.
It is no coincidence then that her article about the "Decay of Cinema", which was her last publication on film revisits this idea again. Here she specifically defines this special attention and appreciation for film as something that has been lost since the glory days of cinema in the 1960s and 1970s when the writers for Les Cahiers du Cinema embodied this 'true cinephilia'. For Sontag, at its most basic level this love for the cinema is a love that is attached to the detail, the moment, the trace in film. I would argue that in an era where we are left, in some cases, with only traces, parts, details of films, there is a fertile climate for a revival of 'cinephilia', especially in combination with the nostalgia for a medium that now has been cast to history.
It is no surprise then that Susan Sontag is not the only one to resurrect 'cinephilia' at this time. Mary Ann Doane explains that it is only normal that "a certain nostalgia for
33 Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 3-14.
118 cinema" precedes its "death". While Doane also (inspired by Miriam Hansen) describes 'cinephilia' also as "a free-floating attention to detail and contingency", she approaches the phenomenon from a very different point of view than Sontag, not as something to strive for but as something from the past. She defines the term as "an intense and privileged relation to contingency, assured by photographic indexicality in the abstract, which can be loved again, [but] this time as lost". For her, this explains why
"one doesn't - and can't - love the televisual or digital in quite the same way. It is as though the aim of theory were to delineate more precisely the contours of an object at the moment of its historical demise."36 She hereby joins many film scholars who see the need to redefine both their object of study and their field of study in the event of film's death and the need to question the role cinema has played, plays and will play in culture. In that sense, 'cinephilia' becomes itself an object of analysis:
a historicized stance, the historical moment of a relation to cinema. That relation is one which may be definable only negatively, as that which resists systematicity, rationalization, programming, and standardization. It is the leakage of the system, potentially mobilizable as its ruin.37
With this description of 'cinephilia', Doane points to the fact that we now might 'love' cinema and film (the medium) more, because it is at a crossroads and seems to be threatened with its disappearance, not necessarily because of something we see in the individual films (a psychological satisfaction) but because of what film means at this time
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 35 Miriam Hansen. "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity." In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 362-402. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 228-229. 37 Ibid., 229.
119 (as a sociological phenomenon). Earlier she had already noted that "it is arguable that
'cinephilia' would not be revived at this conjuncture were the cinema not threatened by the accelerated development of new electronic and digital forms of media." In other words, 'cinephilia', a term which has caused and still causes many debates, would not have been revived from its dormant state since the 1970s, if it was not for the most recent
'death of film'. In its revival, it was transformed from a highly individual and rather high brow concept linked to the idea of 'auteurs' in film (in a way creating 'auteurs' in film studies and among film lovers in general), into a love for the cinema that includes all works of film which are, after all, if not threatened at least affected by the digital revolution.
A-ROLL: Towards a Revival of (Small) Cinema
Despite the fact that many of the texts dealing with the 'decay of cinema' (e.g.
Sontag, Cheshire and Dixon) have an air of the older generation not coping very well with the directions taken by the new generation of filmmakers and audiences more at ease with digital technology, it is noteworthy that they all stress the need for more (space for) alternative voices, for more complexity, more recognition for classic films and the (re-
)inclusion of non-canonical films. Wheeler Winston Dixon actually dedicated significant parts of his book The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving
Image (2000) to "voices of the margin". He exposes the numerous cases of cinematic marginalization, such as racial, social and economic, "in which the potential viewer,
Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 228. 39 Unfortunately he only describes the content of their work, not how it has changed thanks (or due) to digital technology. Dixon, The Second Century of Cinema.
120 through a variety of strategies, is literally denied access to a completed work."40 From this point of view, one can easily say that cinema has suffered from decay all along - metaphorically speaking - simply because (film-)history itself is a process of carefully selecting stories, silencing many others. Film history is not a process of accumulation but a series of events that can be defined by its exclusion of others. What is needed most as part of a new 'cinephilia' is greater resistance against the dominance of hyperindustrial films and the commercial discourse of the film industry at the cost of marginal voices and small independent filmmaking. After all, as Herve Fisher argues, Hollywood's control
"has directly contributed to the demise of thousands of small theatres and has helped marginalize art and experimental film, national cinema, auteur film, and activist film, including short features and documentaries."41 Dixon actually thinks that this will change soon:
Although Hollywood will seek to retain its dominance over the global presentation of Active entertainment constructs, a new vision of international access, and a democracy of images, will finally inform the future structure of cinematographic culture in the twenty-first century. Many of the stories told will remain familiar; genres are most comfortable when they are repeated with minor variations. But as the production and exhibition of the moving image moves resolutely into the digital age, audiences will have greater access to a plethora of visual constructs from every corner of the earth.42
If this is not yet happening on the big screens, what is happening on small screens such as
YouTube is already a major step in this direction. Specifically for film, there is also a revival of smaller festivals that now can happen completely online and of digital distribution systems such as Daniel Langois' DigiScreen in Montreal - a new digital
Dixon, The Second Century of Cinema, 190. 41 Herve Fischer, The Decline of the Hollywood Empire. Translated by Rhonda Mullins. (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006), 68. Dixon, The Second Century of Cinema, ix.
121 network aiming to enhance the diversity in cinema. Also, there is an upsurge of amateur filmmakers' groups, active in several countries under the umbrella 'Planet Kino'.44
B-ROLL: Double Dutch (digital video, lmin 49s)
Double Dutch is a short comedic slug-film video that could be a public service announcement for the Foreign Language Association. It uses similar doubled 35mm images from an unidentified film: a simple headshot of a man is firmly squeezed into the
16mm frame so that, with some imagination, one could think that it is John Cleese. The main sound is a text titled Word Association, a typical Monty Python piece that makes no sense whatsoever and yet sounds logical nevertheless.45 This barrage of words and sentences matches the erratic rhythm of the double images, hence a first reason for the title. But there is also literally double Dutch in the film, since I subtitled the nonsensical voice-over text in Dutch. I followed the original text closely, and carefully replaced names with references that would make sense to a Belgian audience: King Boudewijn,
Flemish writer Christine Hemmerechts, the world famous singer Helmut Lotti etc...I made this short video in reaction to the dominance of both Hollywood and American
English in Cinema, what John Cleese more poetically calls the "beasties of All-American
Speak". But Double Dutch is also indirectly a plea for the use of subtitles and against the horrible practice of dubbing films. Last, but not least, it is also a plea for more attention to the cinema of small countries and to give their films a space beyond the festival circuit.
Fisher, Decline of the Hollywood Empire, 84. 44 Ibid.,149. 45 Monty Python, "Word Association," Matching Tie and Handkerchief, Arista:BMG Music (Compact Disc).
122 Too many great films die an early death by lack of distribution out of fear that their 'local flavour' and 'foreign language' will not please North-American audiences.
A-ROLL: The Many Deaths of Film/Cinema
A good antidote against some of the pessimism and fatalistic thinking about the current 'death of film' is to recall that, since its birth, film has died many deaths and survived them all, and that even the current threat of digital technology is not that recent.
As Rodowick states "the question is not whether cinema will die, but rather just how long ago it ceased to be."46 In other words, the digital take-over is not that new, but our perception of it being a complete take-over is. Rodowick gives a concise overview of how the technological process of digital substitution has been taking place in the industry since the late 1970s. He adds: "the digital agents have already won, it would seem, but they continue to play out the conflict to delay our recognition of the fact" which he also describes as "yet one more ironic twist to the logic of digital paranoia in fin-de-siecle cinema."47 In the 2003 edition of Hors Champ/Off Screen Stephan Jovanovich demonstrates how the discourses in the most recent end-of-cinema-debate continue this
"persistent tendency to postulate the end of cinema that has been present since its birth as they collectively put forth a multi-dimensional causal picture to which the end of cinema might be both anticipated and lamented."48
Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 26. 47 Ibid., 9-10; 8. 48 Stefan Jovanovich "The Ending(s) of Cinema: Notes on the Recurrent Demise of the Seventh Art, Part 1 and Part 2." OffScreen 7, no. 4 (April 2003), Http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/death cinema.htmKaccessed October 3, 2004): 1-2.
123 A good remedy is to recall that since its conception, film was considered a medium without a future. Even Antoine Lumiere, one of its inventors proclaimed this belief. Refusing to give his invention to George Melies, he told him: "Young man, you
should thank me. This invention will ruin you. It can be exploited for a while as a
scientific curiosity; beyond that it has no commercial future." Recent scholarship on the invention of cinema confirms that the technological and cultural status of the early
cinema was precarious since it competed with many other techniques and forms of popular entertainment and leisure. As Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz state,
"cinema constituted only one element in an array of new modes of technology, representation, spectacle, distraction, consumerism, ephemerality, mobility, and entertainment - and at many points neither the most compelling nor the most promising one".50 Besides reinforcing the idea that both the birth and the 'death of film' are probably exaggerated for dramatic purposes, these new perspectives on the history of film also remind us that 'new technology' is a historically relative term. As Carolyn
Marvin writes, cinema was only one of five proto-mass media that were invented around the same time: the telephone, the phonograph, electric light and the wireless were introduced in the decades just before film.51 Yet the usual starting point for the social
Despite that several authors refer to this line (the last part of the quote), honesty obliges to mention that his position may have been disingenuous, since the Lumiere Brothers stubbornly refused to sell their apparatus or share it with others. Antoine Lumiere, their father, stated that his invention was to remain a big secret and that he did not want to sell: he wanted to exploit it himself. See: http://www.terramedia.co.uk/quotations/Quotes L.htm, (accessed 27 November, 2009). 5 Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 51 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, 4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
124 history of electric media is the institutional birth of film and broadcasting and the development of large audiences in the twentieth century.
Everything before this artifactual moment is classified as technical prehistory, a neutral boundary at which inventors and technicians with no other agenda of much interest assembled equipment that extended negligible social impact until the rise of network broadcasting. But a great deal more was going on in the late nineteenth century. New electric media were sources of endless fascination and fear, and provided constant fodder for social experimentation. All debates about electronic media in the twentieth century begin here, in fact. For if this is the case, as it is fashionable to assert, that media give shape to the imaginative boundaries of modern communities, then the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in old media that have provided the stable currency of social exchange are reexamined, challenged, and defended.52
Indeed, in the history of film, not only the introduction of new media (including film's own birth) but also technological inventions that were meant to improve the medium were accompanied by debates that challenged or defended the changes. That is how technical film history took shape as an ongoing succession of historical traumas: the arrival of sound (probably the only event that came close to a real death in cinema, the death of the silent film), the introduction of television, the advent of video technology,
VHS tapes and the remote control, and then most recently digital technology. Each of them were announced as the 'death of film'. That is why, among many others, Rodowick argues that the claim that 'film is dead' is exaggerated and that this is only another phase of changes in the history of moving images. Rodowick finds it useful to point out again that the debate about the 'death of film' is a constructed story, a narrative, one that has been played out before, be it before with less dramatic endings.
Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New. Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film.
125 The 'death of film' is a recurrent powerful metaphor that covers multiple and often contradictory meanings. If we would continue to untangle the various threads that weave the current story about the 'death of film', we would see that the claim remains vague, confusing, even contradictory, but ultimately that it is (and always has been) highly influential. It has entered scholarly, journalistic and popular discourses about the state of film, especially about a decade ago when the continuous announcements about the 'death of film' fitted comfortably in the fin-de-siecle Zeitgeist. On the other hand, the triumphant announcements about the wonders of digital technology fit comfortably with the anticipation and expectations that a new century brings, just like the last one did which was announced by its own exciting revolutionary invention: film. As an illustration of the complexity of the multiple and recurrent claims that film is dead, what follows is a testimony from a filmmaker, somebody who actively contributed to creating the 'film is dead' story. Hence, cinema was not just 'murdered' by Hollywood and digital technology: it was also an inside job.
A-ROLL: Jean-Luc Godard Works the Oracle
As Michael Witt describes, Godard has actively and creatively invoked a series of deaths of cinema in a post-television apocalyptic fashion by (similar to Sontag's analysis) giving cinema a human body and a life cycle: "to claim that the cinema can die assumes that it is, or was, alive. Cinema, an industrial art form, is thus inherently romanticized and accorded a 'life'."54 Besides a life, Godard also regularly gives cinema human attributes
Michael Witt "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard." Screen 40, no. 3 (Autumn, 1999): 332.
126 and a body: he even goes as far as to link the death of the cinema with his own mortality, thereby limiting the lifespan for cinema:
I think that I'll probably die at the same time as the cinema, such as it was invented...The existence of cinema can't exceed, roughly, the length of a human life: between eighty and 120 years. It's something that will have been transitory, ephemeral.55
Maybe that is why throughout his entire oeuvre of writings, films and interviews, Godard had cinema die several deaths and undergo various mutations. One of his first and most influential announcements of the end of cinema was the inter-title 'FIN DE CINEMA' in the film Week-end (1967). This was actually preceded in 1961 by a leftist pamphlet from
Roger Bousinot Le Cinema est mort, Vive le Cinema, which is cited by Godard in Le
Mepris (1963). It was a call to execute cinema in its industrial form, similar to Truffaut's famous article "A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema" which was a major inspiration for Robert Ray for his project to reinvent film studies. This was all part of the
May '68 revolution, when entire groups of radicalized filmmakers and technicians called not to mourn this death, "but rather to analyze it critically and utilize it as a basis for the tentative construction of a new form of cinema."56 But 'this sparkle of hope' was soon overshadowed by a new degradation of visual culture, what Godard referred to as 'the television mutation':
In the context of the cinema/body metaphor, the cinema, having acquired human form, is open to a variety of deaths, short, sharp and violent, or slow and lingering. This final death is treated as the disintegration of an art form being eaten away from within by the proliferation of homogenized conventional (televisual) images. 57
Jean-Luc Godard, cited in Witt (his translation), "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard," 333. 56 Ibid., 335. 57 Ibid., 336.
127 Like Jean Rouch who said that video was the AIDS of film,58 Godard frequently used cancer as a metaphor to comment on how cinema is affected by 'electronic tumours' to invoke
a general notion of contemporary cinematic cinema production as lamentably thin and, in terms of its social function, marginalized and 'occupied'. Whilst we are free to refute the grounds and pessimism of such a thesis, the notion that the power of cinema is fading, and that films have come increasingly to resemble pop videos or advertisements is accepted in many critical quarters. Cinema within such a logic is 'outdated', no longer 'required' as a form of cultural representation.59
The degradation of cinema and visual culture in general that Godard critiques (by treating
TV as a contagious disease) is just a typical provocation on his behalf akin to the drama he creates and critiques in his own films, but it is an influential one. Witt actually goes as far as to say that much of the recent talk about the death of cinema can be traced back to
Godard and his hyperbolical statements about the lamentable state of cinema as an art form as early as the early 1960s.60
Besides blaming TV for the decay of cinema, another recurrent worry of Godard is one that other scholars and film critics also recognize as a possible cause for the 'death of film': the end of film projection. "Le cinema disparaitra quand il ne sera plus projete."
Godard refutes the idea that cinema is actually alive and well thanks to the availability of films on VHS and DVD. As is often the case, Godard develops his argument on several metaphorical planes. As Witt explains:
58 Mentioned in Witt, "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard." 94. 59 Ibid., 336. 60 By far one of the more original theses about the "death of cinema" explored by Godard is the one linked to the Holocaust: the failure of cinema to deal with the horrors of the Nazi genocide of Jews. Witt, Ibid., 334 and 345.
128 The concept of 'projection', we should note, is heavy with resonances, figuring the intermeshing of the physical projection of the cinematic images with the interpretative work of 'making sense': as Godard has suggested, every entry in the cinema represents an 'exit' on the part of the viewer (literally, in the sense of leaving home, and figuratively in the sense of the projection of self on the film). If television projects nothing, according to Godard, it is simply because it has no project.61
Godard's main argument is that while cinema is capable of telling us stories about life, television presents only 'programmes', creating 'spectators' that are subjected to it (the recurrent idea of a passive TV audience).62 Godard's obsession with opposing 'project'
(in a Platonian sense) to 'projection' recurs in many interviews, but besides a confirmation of his (and other's) suspicion towards TV in favour of cinema, this is only in part a motivation to keep announcing the 'death of film' for Godard. To understand his obsession, one should also look at his constant romanticizing of the 1960s, the period of his early work that has come to represent a certain kind of cinema, namely:
[a] European art cinema in its pure state, before the angry gate crashing of the socio-political (in the guise of 1968) or the eruption of television. Thus Godard evokes the 1960s as a lost era of cinematic freedom when 'la magie existait encore .
Much of Godard's lamenting resonates with Sontag's mourning over the loss of
'cinephilia', the loss of a certain love for the cinema as (a modern) art. This particular kind of'cinephilia' operates in Godard's oeuvre both as a positive and dynamic force that
61 Witt, "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard," 342. This idea is based on parts from Jean-Luc Godard, Godard by Godard, (Cambridge, Da Capo Press, 1986), 612-613. 62 Robert Ebert echoed this concern recently at the 1999 Cannes film festival (see further). 63 It is good to keep in mind that Godard actually made several projects for television. So his attitude towards the medium must be seen more as a love-hate relationship than as an intellectual bashing of TV as "lower" culture. 64 Witt, "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard," 343.
129 made of him one of the most prolific and creative filmmakers of the past five decades; as
well as one of the most pessimistic and melancholic scholars, an influential one, not an
easy one. The fact that he very eloquently and intelligently plays with the metaphor of
'death', results in the fact that often each of the different 'deaths of cinema' of the
different eras he evokes, exist all at once and have dense, multilayered and contradictory
meanings. If it is true that, as Witt states, "much of the recent talk on the deterioration,
decay and death of cinema can be traced back to Godard"65, then accordingly, so can a lot
of the confusion and pessimism that comes with the topic.
B-ROLL: Double Talk (digital video, 2min 39s)
Double Talk is another slug-film video made with 35mm footage cut in half. For
this critical commentary on film as an entertainment business, the images I used are from
one of the many romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan (I suspect from You've Got Mail
(1998)). For this film I 'un-squeezed' the images so that one can see them as they were
intended: in wide-screen. This gives the project more of a mainstream feel than Double
Shot and Double Dutch. Since the images are mostly of Meg Ryan talking on the phone, I
designed the film as a fake phone interview with her, in the typical style of Access
Hollywood and other celebrity gossip programs. The soundtrack is a collage of similar
interviews with Meg Ryan I found as podcasts on the Internet (the bad quality sound
needed a lot of work to become 'digi-worthy'). The rest of the sound comes from a
famous scene in which Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm from the film When Harry Met Sally
(1989) - Meg Ryan's break-through film. This particular scene is actually mentioned and
explained in one of the interview portions. In Double Talk the scene also functions as an
65 Witt, "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard," 345.
130 ironic reference to the film industry's relentless self-promotion, and it hints at the new
possibilities for phone-sex on Skype. I portrayed the second main character of the film,
the man on the phone (Tom Hanks?), as the main interviewer. Just as Meg Ryan fakes the
orgasm, the climax in the film is made with fake film effects.
A-ROLL: Death by Digital: a Replay?
Coming from a very different world, Roger Mayer, president of the Turner
Entertainment Company, has also heard the song that film is dead many times before. In
each case the successor for film was something electronic:
Ever since I started in the movie business in 1952,1 have been hearing that film would not be around very much longer. It was always just about to be replaced by something electronic. First broadcast television, then cable television, than video-cassettes and DVDs, then the Internet - all have lined up for the role of movie-killer. The difference now may be that all of these threatening mediums are united by a single characteristic: they are all digital, or rapidly becoming so.66
I think that it is important to recognize that the fact that now these 'new' media
threatening film are all digital. The fact that in the last decade digital media have become
very visible and accessible for the public at large probably has contributed to creating a
much more general and persuasive perception that film is dead. With Paolo Cherchi Usai
I find that:
The much-noted benefits of the digital revolution have quickly shifted towards a subtle yet persuasive ideology. There is something inherently reactionary in how worldwide consensus has been gathered around this
Roger Mayer, cited in David Chute, "Film Preservation At the (Digital) Crossroads", "Film Preservation at the (Digital) Crossroads." Film Comment (forthcoming), 1-2. http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/3102/f-prez.htm. Accessed on May 1st, 2008.
131 new myth of scientific progress. What is worse, denouncing its excesses will make you feel like the latest anti-technologist on the block.67
Indeed, digital technology is so much with us that we are not prompted to question the
myths that come with it, created by technologists who champion novelty, change and
progress, but who are rarely critical about the (imposed) changes, let alone prompt us (the
users) to be critical of the new technology.
Besides countering the ruthless promotion of digital technology since 'the new is
always better', there are other good reasons to be a bit of an anti-technologist these days,
and to fight for film. For example, despite its still excellent qualities as a moving image
carrier, the industry relentlessly presents film itself as the perfect medium to evoke
history, as a medium that is the past. For example, a grainy black-and-white or faded
colour film is immediately promoted as representing history and memory. Earlier this
role was attributed to photography, as Roland Barthes explains in Camera Lucida
(1981),68 a book that retroactively can be seen as announcing the death of photography
(while exploring the relationship between photography and death). Before, the
photograph was coded as the past, as the 'what-has-been'. Now this characteristic has
been attributed to film, the now-old medium from a past century. As Catherine Russell
explains, digital image processing has opened up the possibility of infinite manipulation
so that "in light of the TV monitor, the cinema is reinvented as a site of disappearance,
loss and memory."69 Digital effects even mimic this: various digital artefacts allow you to
create 'filmic' effects such as scratches, grain, colour fading, film-flicker and even frame
67 Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema, 3. 68 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 69 Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 7.
132 bums: the way these effects are used (for example in commercials) promotes and
enhances the general idea that film is about memory, the past, in the best case about 'the
good old times', but in any case reinforcing the idea that film is history, that film is dead.
The irony is that these effects less and less refer to something that is actually 'out
there' - namely actual film prints with such characteristics since they are disappearing
and decaying at a fast rate - so that these filmic effects become ever more purely digital
and virtual. Indeed, using Godard's imagery of death and disease, the only true current
'death of film' we need to worry about is the shrinking, breaking, fading, deteriorating
and ultimately, the crumbling to dust of our cinematic past. That deathly process is very
active and present. But film wouldn't be film, if even this death, by far the most tragic
one, should not also be a very beautiful one. Just as it is all the so-called 'flaws of film'
(its scratching, dust and frame burns) that actually make it very alive: no two prints of a
film are ever the same and every print carries its own life-history on its celluloid face.
A-ROLL: The Institutional and Material 'Death of Film'
The public profile of film preservation and archiving has never been higher. As is
generally accepted in film preservation circles, only twenty-five percent of all films of the
1910s, and twenty percent of the films produced in the 1920s are still with us. Many of
these films were destroyed by the industry itself (to protect copyrights and for other
71
trivial reasons) or went up in flames (nitrate is highly flammable). Of the early films
that remain, many are now fast disintegrating due to nitrate degradation. The combination
70 See demo-reel included in the creative part of this thesis, and the frame comparisons between filmic and digital "wear and tear" in the illustration section at the end (annex). 71 Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec. This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film. (International Federation of Film Archives. Bruxelles: Fiaf, 2002).
133 of the celebrations of one hundred years of cinema, with a renewed interest in early cinema, has sparked a new interest in nitrate films and, in some cases, even a true fetishisation.72 Thanks to this awareness, any found copies of early films are now treated as treasures. For these films the slogan 'nitrate can't wait' and the 'Nitrate 2000' campaigns have had their effect.73 For more recent films, mostly features, Martin
Scorsese's relentless campaign for film preservation is showing results. Already in the
1970s, Scorsese was one of the first to 'blow the whistle' on colour fading. Since then he has been campaigning on behalf of all cinema treasures, from all ages. And indeed many features of Hollywood's glory days are restored and saved for the future, also thanks to the possibilities of digital technology to restore the films so that they regain an image quality that the big studios want for their products.
But then there are the thousands of small films that are still physically, commercially and historically neglected. Most of these films are on small (non commercial) formats such as 8mm and 16mm, and on acetate film, which we now know is also subject to chemical decay, and this at an even faster rate than nitrate film despite its label 'safety film'. A process called 'acetate degradation' causes the films to shrink, curl and turn brittle. It has been dubbed 'vinegar syndrome' after its distinctive odour when you open the can. There are also the numerous Eastman colour films, some even only a few years old, that have turned rosy-pink.74 And if these film-deteriorating phenomena are not bad enough, they also are (and have been) the excuse to trash lots of
Dominique Paini, "Reproduction, Disappearance" in This Film is Dangerous, 173. 73 Several filmmakers also helped this cause by making compilation or collage films with nitrate films, disintegrated or not. See chapter 4. 74 Chute, "Film Preservation At The (Digital) Crossroads", 5.
134 films, especially at times when a new video format came along. This is the major difference between films of a commercial or non-commercial nature.
For instance, since the boom of the DVD market, many films of the studio system were restored and re-issued. Now the industry is actually following the commercial model of Roger Mayer, general manager of MGM. Already in the 1960s he made his studio a bastion of film preservation and film restoration by pitching this idea as 'asset management' to his board of directors. He would ask them if they really want 'their assets to deteriorate?' which certainly got their attention.75 These days the label 'restored print' is even constantly used as a positive commercial value, as an audience pleaser. But we still need to shift this positive attention for film preservation more to work that only public funds can pay for, many being 'orphan films'. These are films that do not have owners (let alone big studios) with an immediate financial stake in seeing them restored.
A positive example is an initiative by the Library of Congress: through its National Film
Preservation Foundation they issue DVDs with ''Lost Treasures'" preserved by the George
Eastman House, such as rare cartoons, newsreels, advocacy films, training films etc....
There is also the international compilation titled Saved from the Flames with fifty-four rare and restored films from 1896 to 1944, in which the national film registry of the
United States Library of Congress also participated.
Yet there is another commercial incentive that might help to get more small films restored and stored properly: to sell them as stock footage. But this is all rather random business. For example, some of the films in my collection, mostly prints I have saved from garbage bins or rusty shelves in obscure antique stores, I can now find on eBay.
Ibid., 3.
135 Obviously this is a possibility only for films that were distributed in larger numbers, such as 8mm and 16mm films that were produced for the home market.76 This also touches on the complex issue that, for most titles, there are multiple prints in circulation. Paolo
Cherchi Usai has traced the possible genealogy of film prints for a silent film, showing how along the way many prints of that film can be orphaned, but that this does not necessarily result in the total loss of the film as long as one print survives, and of course as long as someone cares for at least one of the prints, and/or the original negatives.77
A bigger problem is to preserve home movies and amateur films. They are unique and there is usually only one print available, often even only a positive since many were shot on reversal film. Many home movies were already discarded when VHS came around. People just made copies of their footage and trashed the originals. This process occurred despite the fact that many of these home movies and other amateur films are an important part of our cultural history - as recognized by film scholars such as Patricia
Zimmermann, Karen Ishizuka and Michelle Citron78. And also while, as we now know,
VHS tapes themselves have much less archival stability (as do DVDs - a technology with a lifespan of maximum five years79).
A well-known example of a company that produced many films for the home-movie market was Castle Films in the US: see Belles of the South Seas (1944) in Chapter 4. 77 Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (BFI Publishing: London, 2000). no Patricia Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Arts and Politics of the Everyday. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Michelle Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. Visible Evidence 4. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman eds., Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). According to Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland cited in the magazine PC World, two years is about the average life expectancy of a burned disc, and if you keep it in a dark, cool place it might last for five. "Burning for the Long Haul"
136 And this brings me to an important issue with regards to all films (as images on
celluloid film), even if they are discoloured, brittle, dusty, scratched, broken,
shrunk.. .they can all still be saved and used. Through digital transfers or with traditional
optical printing, copies can be made that to some extent can bring back the original
colours of the film. Even if the print remains discoloured, or damaged in any other way,
we can still see the images and study what the film is telling us about the past. It is
therefore high time to turn our attention to 'orphan films'.
A-ROLL: Orphan Films
In its most general meaning, 'orphans' - a term used by librarians and archivists
for all media - refer to works for which the copyright holders cannot be identified or
located. Both text-based and audiovisual materials include substantial numbers of works
with unclear copyright status, especially older materials.80 For film, the term gained
interest in North America thanks to the National Film Preservation Plan in the US. It was
during the initial hearings for this plan in 1993 that David Francis from the Library of
Congress used the term for the first time in a public context.81 Since then, 'orphan film'
in The Sydney Morning Herald, July 15 , 2006. See: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/livewire/ In the original article, Kurt Gerecke recommends using magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime. See: http://www.pcworld.com/article/124312/do_burned_cds_have_a_short_life_span.html Both accessed, July 17th, 2009. 80 Register of Copyrights, "Report on Orphan Works", January 2006, 1. See http://www.copvright.gov/orphan/orphan-report.pdf retrieved July 16th, 2009. 81 David Francis, Hearing Before the Panel of the National Film Preservation Board, United States Library of Congress, A Study of the Current State of American Film Preservation, (Washington, D.C.: 1993)
137 has quickly become a common term in archival and scholarly language. In 1999 Dan
Streible, now from NYU but then at the University of South Carolina, organized the first
Orphan Film Symposium. Six more symposia followed, each one bigger and more successful so that his initiative gradually became a movement with connections around
0-3 the globe. This bi-annual Orphan Film Symposium is a gathering of archivists, preservationists, curators, scholars, collectors, technology experts, and media artists from around the world who come together to study and screen neglected moving images. The neglect in question can b& physical (deteriorating film prints), commercial (unreleased film copies), cultural (censored footage), or historical (forgotten films). The Orphan Film
Symposium defines 'orphan films' more broadly as any "motion picture that is abandoned by its owner or caretaker", including not just "films that lack clear copyright holders" but also those that "lack commercial potential". It lists as 'orphan films' all kinds of films outside the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films, industrial and educational movies, independent documentaries, ethnographic films, newsreels, censored material, underground works, experimental pieces, silent-era productions, stock footage, found footage, medical films, kinescopes, small and unusual gauge films, amateur productions, surveillance footage,
Paolo Cherchi Usai, "What Is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale, Controversy." Paper delivered at the symposium Orphans of the Storm: Saving Orphan Films in the Digital Age, University of South Carolina, September 23, 1999. Transcript at http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/archive/orphans2001/usai.html, 1. 83 For example, Streible works with the renowned film restoration company Haghefilm Conservation in The Netherlands. This company has closely followed all changes in film technology since the 1920s. Currently they combine all their acquired expertise in analogue film processing and printing techniques with the latest digital sound and image facilities for film restoration. See: http://www.haghefilm.nl/en/index.html 84 "What is an Orphan Film", The Orphan Film Symposium, March 22-25, 2006 http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/orphanfilm.html
138 test reels, government films, advertisements, sponsored films, student works, and
assorted other ephemeral pieces of celluloid. Obviously this list contains many
overlapping categories, for example small gauge films and amateur films, or found
footage and any other of the films mentioned, but it gives a good idea of the eclectic
nature of'orphan films'. It is this broader definition of what an 'orphan film' is, that I
have adopted here as well.85
For moving images the term and the concern about 'orphan films' came from the
archival community when, in the 1990s, the evocation of 'save the orphan film'
effectively replaced the 1980s credo 'nitrate can't wait'. New research had revealed that
nitrate actually can wait and that all film material, whether nitrate or acetate or even
polyester, are potentially equally at risk in the absence of proper storage - not to mention
the graveyard of dead tape formats and the so called 'digital rot'86 that is making lots of
archivists anxious about the future of moving images. Archivists used the new slogan
'save an orphan' successfully to seek funding from the public and private sector to help
restore and preserve 'orphan films' in their collections. As Paolo Cherchi Usai states:
"what is so powerful about the term orphan film is not only its effectiveness - it is
something that is fairly easy to understand without much explanation - but also its
It is worth noting that the word "orphan" itself has three connotations that help to understand the scope of the term orphan film as well: (1) to be deprived of care and protection, (2) an item not developed because it is unprofitable (an orphan drug) and (3) a discontinued model (an orphan car model). See: "What is an Orphan Film", The Orphan Film Symposium, March 22-25, 2006 http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/orphanfilm.html 86 See "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: CBS looks at Data Rot", a news article posted by Library of Congress about a CBS cover story on how hardware and software becomes quickly obsolete and "every recording media is left in the dust". The video claims that every recording medium becomes obsolete in about 10 years. See: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4836762n. Broadcast on March 4l , 2009. Accessed on July 17th, 2009.
139 emotional resonance." Indeed, it is the emotional appeal of the term that helps to make
people care about these films, which before were not just abandoned by their owner or
caretaker, but also lacked public interest in general. And yet, our entire film heritage is an
important part of the collective memory of our past. Hence, as Dan Streible also
recognizes, the phrase quickly also entered scholarly discourses because 'media scholars'
deep interest in the varieties of alternative or non-dominant media resonates with the
epithet 'orphan film'.88 It is the same openness and interest in non-dominant media that
strengthens our belief that "rather than focus narrowly on an artefact's copyright status to
define its orphan hood, we do better to apply the orphan concept to the study of media
and culture writ large." 89
Found-footage filmmakers have made films with 'orphan films' for decades. This
is actually how my interest in 'orphan films' began. But over the last couple of years, as I
became more and more interested in film history and especially the small and forgotten
stories of film history, my appreciation of found-footage films changed. My perception of
found-footage films has shifted from an emphasis on the content of the images used in
relation to the new film to the origins and content of the original source material used. In
other words, if we want to consider found-footage films as an alternative film archive of
'orphan films', the main question is to what extent the filmmaker is celebrating or
deconstructing the images used.
As William Wees in his book Recycled Images, The Art and Politics of Found
Footage Films explains, there are different methods of using found-footage. He cites Ken
on Paolo Cherchi Usai, "What Is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale, Controversy." 88 Dan Streible, "The Role of Orphan Films in the 21st Century Archive." Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (Spring, 2007): 124. 89 Ibid., 128.
140 Jacobs to remind us that "a lot of film is perfect left alone": it permits us to see the original footage as its maker and his or her contemporaries saw it. This way, "we observe the passage of time, how it has invested the film footage with nostalgia, historical and sociological interest, and an aesthetic value that is apparent only because [the filmmaker] left the footage intact, rather than re-editing it to suit his own formal and thematic concerns."90 Thanks to these found-footage filmmakers we get to see the whole film as it is, and as such the filmmaker has made it available to us for study, and has preserved it. But these images are not always used uncut in recognition of the unrecognized gems of cinematic art that they are. These are the exceptions. More often the filmmakers use the found footage because "their very artlessness exposes them to more critical - and more amusing - readings than their original makers intended or their original audiences were likely to produce."91
Indeed, most experimental filmmakers rework the original film material in some way, so that its richer implications become apparent, and they combine images from different films. They inter-cut these found images to build a new narrative and to tell us about their personal concerns.92 Some, besides cutting and pasting, also use technical tricks such as repetition and slow motion, or layering (superimposition). Others attack the footage itself by scratching it or painting over the images. In these cases, the more the material is inter-cut with other source material and the more the images are reworked, the
Wees, Recycled Images, 6. 91 Ibid., 8. 92 Arthur Lipsett was a master in this. See my earlier work: Lipsett's Legacy: Recollecting Collage Films from the NFB and CFMDC. Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Lipsett's Legacy: Recollecting Collage Films From the NFB and CFMDC" shown at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Saw Gallery in Ottawa. Halifax: Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, 2007.
141 more the original images disappear to the background and lose the connection with the original film and its message. When this is the case, such found-footage films still remind us of the huge collection of neglected non-commercial films out there, even if it is more a question of showing off their oddity than a concern for their survival as crucial parts of our film history.
If there are many 'orphan films' out there that show us their 'artlessness', there are as many if not more that impress by their professional quality and 'artfulness', as well as their interesting, at times intriguing, content. That is why I consider the possibility to restudy found-footage films as moving picture guides to hidden treasures and vanished media. As interesting creative catalogues of bits and pieces of films we should be on the look-out for the films used, and save these as part of our cultural heritage. It will not be easy. A lot depends on the approaches of the filmmakers, and if they 'credit' the original films by listing them at the end of the film or keep them in anonymity.931 know this goes against the idea of collage films as counter or underground culture, but as a scholar I really appreciate it if I can see at the end where the footage comes from, the date it was produced and by whom it was made. I have the habit of doing so, but it is the exception.
Most filmmakers, concerned about copyrights, try to call no attention to the fact that they are using the footage 'illegally'.
This brings me to another complicated issue: copyrights and the role of public institutions. We would really be served by a less rigid approach to 'orphan films' by legal
I really understood the complications of a more historical approach to found-footage films from comparing Peter Delpeut's film Lyrical Nitrate (1990) and Bill Morrison's Decasia (2004): see Chapter 4. In some cases films do not have credits and then it is not possible to list the origin of the found-footage used. This is especially the case with early films.
142 institutions94, because what counts most is that these films are adopted and preserved. As the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain stated "Orphan films make up the overwhelming majority of our cinematic heritage, and are a vital part of the culture and cultural record of the twentieth century."95 It is also not without reason that the Library of
Congress declared that "it is in the task of restoring these orphan films that the urgency may be the greatest" because many of these works are literally disintegrating.96 This is why the whole second part of my creative research is dedicated to orphan films and the stories they tell about the state of film in the digital age.
A-ROLL: What Is/Was Film?
Whether pro or contra, the already blurred line between video and cinema continues to vanish, and film as a medium is pushed out of the picture. The most recent high
94 In Europe as part of the Digital Library initiative a Memorandum of Understanding Orphan Works was approved in 2007. It facilitates the clearance of rights for orphan works and their use, including digitalization. What we have here in Canada is.the Canadian Regime for Unlocatable Copyright Owners, and it was actually one of the documents the European Expert Group on copyright looked at to create their report. This regime is based on the notion that the user has performed a reasonable effort to locate the copyright owner of the work. The user is then supposed to make an application to the Copyright Board of Canada to obtain the copyright if this whole search does not result in finding legal copyright holders. Obviously, these legal guidelines are not very practical for the study of orphan films, neither for who wants to use them in found-footage films. 5 Duke Law School, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Orphan Works: Analysis and Proposal, Submission to the United States Copyright Office, March 2005, Duke University, http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdproposal.pdf, (Accessed 3rd March, 2008), 1 96 Ibid.
143 Q7 definition digital technology can produce images of a resolution as high as 35mm film no and recorded at film speed (24 frames per second). HD is winning over even the most feverish believers in celluloid (myself included). Hence it is time to ask ourselves if indeed we lose something, and if so, what it is that we lose with the 'death of film'.
Cheshire thinks that we will gradually come to the conclusion that cinema is fundamentally linked to film (hence we lose cinema as well as film): If you take away film, what you have left may look much the same for a while, but soon enough you'll realize that it doesn't function the same. And one function that will accompany film into the museums, I think, is cinema, a peculiar kind of storytelling technological art that has reigned widely and gloriously through most of the 20' century."
Rodowick comes to a similar conclusion in The Virtual Life of Film (2007):
As film disappears into the electronic and virtual realm of numerical manipulation we are suddenly aware that something was cinema. The history of film theory has produced more than ninety years of debate on the question 'What is cinema?' Yet suddenly we feel compelled to ask the question again, but in the past tense. ' (emphasis in original)
I tried to answer the question about what this distinctive qualitative change is precisely from a practical standpoint. As a filmmaker you can feel it in very tangible ways, but it is very difficult to define. So my thesis became very much about studying the migration of film to digital video, not even high definition video yet, while telling stories about what
07 Particularly the Red Camera has caused a revolution in the film world and converted many film people thanks to its super high resolution (4K, equivalent to 35mm) and the possibility to shoot at 60 frames per second: see http://www.red.com/cameras/technology/ 98 The frame rate for video is normally 29.97 frames per second. Filming at 24 frames per second creates a different look: for lack of a better description, a more "filmic" look. 99 Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema", 11. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 31.
144 film is/was,101 creating a 'memory of resistance' against the promotion of the demise of film without recognizing and acknowledging what film is/was. Like Rodowick, I am happy to "admit as many hybridizations of media as artists can invent in their actual practice." But I also want to stress, with Rodowick, that what makes a hybrid cannot be understood if the individual properties being combined cannot be distinguished:
If we cannot be precise about the range and nature of these options, we cannot understand, as either artists or philosophers, what media might do, how they may evolve with respect to one another, or how we might work with a medium or even invent a new one, even if that recognition occurs only after the fact.I02
I think we need to think about these changes, since nobody else, or only few are doing it.
Even if we are doing this after the fact, I would argue for a more optimistic and nuanced debate. For instance, on a cultural level with regards to cinema, it is time to recognize
(countering Cheshire, Hebert and Godard) that in the past decade lots of interesting things have happened in television that would make many (mainstream) filmmakers blush. And
I am not alone in this thought. Chris Marker in a recent interview in Second Life, when asked about what interests him in recent television (e.g. series like The Wire), stated:
"first their actual cinematic quality. It's where all the innovation and invention is taking place. On every level: the story, the editing, the casting, the sound . . . They're ahead of
Hollywood."103 In general, Chris Marker is a better filmmaker to follow these days than
101 A great example of collage films that explore what film is Gustav Deutsch's collage epic Film 1st (1-12) (DVD 2004, 77 min). I saw the first series of six films in 1998 at Le Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, which had a great impact on me. See also Chapter 4. 102 Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 41. 103 "Marker agreed to the rare interview on the condition it be conducted on Second Life, a screen rendezvous, complete with pseudonyms and avatars. There, Marker calls himself Sergei Murasaki, and the interviewers—Julien Gester and Serge Kaganski—Iggy Atlas."
145 Jean-Luc Godard, since he has always been interested in new (media) technology and has experimented with it in interesting ways, making the new possibilities to tell stories the core of his oeuvre. He has always been at the cutting edge of technological innovation, and, as one of few, immediately embraced digital technology as a means to play with the complexity of history and memory. A great early example is his use of computer effects to create 'the Zone' in his 1982 film Sans Soleil. Marker used then emergent computer technology to defamiliarize as a way to regain control over the image as a filmmaker, and to make the audience conscious about the fact that images are representations. As such he created the effects to make the images work as a rewriting of history, as an oppositional memory. "These sequences disrupt the linear progression of cinematic time, the reified, regulated time that represents technological progress. Instead, they combine a lost past, one that is in danger of being forgotten, with the anticipated future of digital technologies."104 Throughout his career, Marker seizes moments of resistant thinking
(such as the 1960s) and reactivates them in his work. As such he created many memories of resistance, "allowing us to imagine alternative futures growing out of forgotten pasts"105, always trying out new technology to do so, such as now Second Life:
Marker's desire for a fully self-sufficient means of production, together with his search for a liberated narrative form to explore the slippages and superimpositions of individual and collective memory has drawn him to experiment with an incredible range of image technologies, from the photo book in his early years to small gauge 16mm and Super-8 cinema and then
Introduction to the interview: See the Criterion Collection: Online Cinematheque. "Chris Marker's Second Life." http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1143 (accessed 27 November, 2009). 104 Chuck Tryon, "Letters from an Unknown Filmmaker", 12. This article is one of the original sources of inspiration for this thesis project and the work of Chris Marker in general continues to be a great encouragement to pursue a creative and critical path in film. 105 Ibid., 13.
146 to video and videogames and most recently, the CD-ROM and Internet. Marker, whose work from as early as La Jetee (1962) is deeply informed by science-fiction, has an uncanny ability to predict the future and to be already there.106 Nevertheless, the gigantic corporate interests behind digital video are totally
careless about how we feel as film viewers, let alone as small independent filmmakers or
as film scholars and educators, about what a world without film will be like in general.
As Cheshire notes, film - this magical thing that has been with us our entire lives - is all
too easily and suddenly swept under the cultural table. That why it is useful to create a
'memory of resistance': to search for alternative ways of thinking and modes of existence
alternative to the market logic of the big corporations. It is important to ask the question
about what will change if everything becomes digital, especially because it is obvious
that the corporations pushing these new technologies prefer that you would not think
about the implications. And most people gladly comply, as Cheshire stated:
Bedazzled and excited by the new technology, people don't want to ponder the loss of the old, so they minimize its importance, brush it aside, pooh-pooh the idea that the whole thing could amount to more than then the exchange of one delivery system for another that's basically the same, just better.107
Cheshire is probably also right that any anti-digital campaign and the impetuses behind it
are mostly emotional and don't stand a chance of tempering the digital wave or of
106 X, announcement for "The Second Life of Chris Marker", a virtual event organized by the Harvard Film Archive on May 16th, 2009. See: Chris Marker, "The Second Life of Chris Marker." From the website Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory. http://www.chrismarker.org/2009/05/ (accessed August 5, 2009). Note that Marker, contrary to Godard, is famous for trying to avoid the popular spotlight at all costs. He leaves all public appearances to his alter ego, the big ginger cat Guillaume-en-Egypte, a tactic he uses to remain completely independent as artist. It is also Guillaume and not Marker who takes also part in Varda's latest auto-portrait-documentary Les Plages d'Agnes (2009). 107 Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema", 8.
147 countering the forces behind it. This can probably explain his lack of optimism about the whole conversion. The concluding paragraph of his introduction, is a good example of millennium dread that many authors dealing with the 'death of film' showed:
Whatever else happens, one thing now is certain. Film is about to disappear over the historical horizon. It will always be a 20th century phenomenon. But guess what? So will you. Everyone old enough to read these words is a product of a world whose understandings and self-images were forged in large part by film. When the millennium clock tics over, we will all be strangers in a strange land, one that belongs to others. It may take a while to realize this, but one day you will be standing in line at the enormoplex, say, and some kid born in the next century will look at you, and that look will tell you who you are: a 20-th century person. A film person. In a world that has left that time and technology behind.I09 (emphasis in original)
Experimental filmmakers know all too well how it feels to be strangers in a strange land, so I actually do not worry about that too much: I am used to it.
To end on a more positive note and with a more encouraging prognosis for film and cinema, I should mention that besides Chris Marker, several other authors recognize that all the changes brought about by digital cinema, are in fact a new beginning, a new chance. In other words, despite some of the predictions at the end of the former century, cinema has not died yet, it is just thoroughly 'remediated':'10
And yet, despite all this, the cinema will live forever. What I'm really talking about here is a technology shift, albeit a profound one, one that will end 'movies as we know them', but not cinema itself. It may be that 35mm film will be consigned to the scrap heap of memory. All-digital production and exhibition will offer us an entirely different sort of theatrical viewing experience. Audiences keep getting younger and more impatient, and yet the classics of the past will continue to haunt us, informing our collective consciousness of mid-to-late twentieth-century culture. It is entirely appropriate that we would witness this seismic
Cheshire, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema", 4. Ibid., 9-10. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 188.
148 adjustment in the first few years of the new century; seen from this perspective, one might just as easily argue that far from dying, the movies are reinventing themselves for the patrons of a new era.'''
Paraphrasing Barthes, we really had better see all this as another 'cinema degree zero', a chance to reinvent film (and film studies). Moreover, we should also keep in mind that a lot of the conversations and discourses about the 'death of film' come from or are referring to the mainstream, while the most inventive and original cinema continues to be created at the periphery of the commercial market place. It is worth stressing that digital technologies have opened up possibilities to many more voices of the margins. Where earlier the small independent filmmaker would take workshops in 'low budget filmmaking', they can now take free courses online about 'no budget filmmaking'. As
Wheeler Winston Dixon states "the cinema of the next millennium will continue to find its greatest inspiration in those who operate outside of the system, creating works of originality and brilliance beyond the zones of corporate financial risk."112 It seems to me that, in the light of the above debates, it is in itself an act of resistance to continue to work in film, or with film, or to make work that celebrates the filmic. That is what I want to focus on, as well as the idea that "no matter how the cinematic medium transforms itself in the coming decades, it will always continue to build on, and carry forward, the
111 Dixon, "Twenty-five Reasons Why It Is All Over", 365-366. 112 Dixon, The Second Century of Cinema, 11. 113 Dixon, "Twenty Four Reasons Why It Is All Over", 366.
149 B-ROLL: Double Jump (digital video, 12 min 51)114
A fourth slug video is a celebration of the marriage between film and digital video, showing off the magic qualities the hybrid image born from this cross-fertilization can have. I was not able to identify this original film, but a glimpse of the background gave away that it was shot in Auckland, New Zealand. Not knowing the original film title for these images was never an obstacle. On the contrary, the incredible marriage of the content of the images, people sky diving, with the effect of the doubled images by cutting the original 35mm in half, was very inspiring. This video is titled Double Jump, referring to a term from video games (another culprit often cited in debates about the 'death of film'). In computer and video games, a 'double jump' refers to the mechanics in which a player can jump, and then, in mid-air, jump again. In reality, this action is impossible because it would require pushing off in mid-air. So far, computer fanatics might so far have been the only ones enjoying this 'magic power', but that is without counting the good old magic of cinema. In this slug video, I have sequenced the double jumps as a funky dance piece on a personal remix of the first electronic music piece I was crazy about as a child: the 1972 song Popcorn by Anarchic System. I kept the original single (a record, hence analogue sound, another obsolete medium), which is what I transferred and remixed. The opening of the film (or better the game) starts with the sound of a plane
114 This video was initially meant to be an installation piece. I am still considering reworking it as such in the future. 115 This makes my piece actually very different from the numerous remixes of this song available on the Internet, as well as the many free ring tones that are derived from it, or even the "royalty free music" one has access to on sound libraries to use for film editing. In the most common sound library I found one piece called Hawaiian Popcorn that is an obvious rip-off of the original. If at first this threw me off and made me consider not using the music, in the end the fact that it is already been copied so many times encouraged me to commit this "illegal" act and use it anyway.
150 flying through the video noise into a sky with sparkles. The sound is actually the needle of the record-player plunging into the grooves of the record, as if the plane breaks through the analogue sound barrier on its way to digital worlds where the sky is the limit, and the shifting film frame-line a dancing life line.
3.2 Conclusions
Changes begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. If a man habituated to a narrow circle of cares and pleasures, out of which he seldom travels, steps beyond it, though for never so brief a space, his departure from the monotonous scene on which he has been an actor of importance would seem to be the signal for instant confusion. The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects has sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust. Charles Dickens
A-ROLL: Manifesto #1: Is film Biting the Dust? (15 statements):
(1) Film, movies and cinema are three different terms that are best used according to their proper meaning. This could avoid a lot of the confusion between the 'death of film'
(celluloid) and the 'decay of cinema' (the deteriorating quality of the movies produced).
(2) The only true 'death of film' is the 'decay of film': the many films fading, shrinking, decaying and crumbling to dust. True to film, this is a beautiful death.
(3) The 'decay of cinema' is a debatable issue, in part based on truths, but as much based on a discontentment with a cinema that supposedly is no longer of the calibre of the art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
(4) Much of the disappointment with today's film production has to do with the very limited (commercial) film distribution that prevents (for example) a lot of world cinema from making its way to our cinemas. In a time of globalization, the tendency in film
151 seems to be diametrically opposite. A chance to see good films from around the globe is reserved for members of Cinematheques and festival-goers (in other words: a small informed elite).
(5) A similar complaint can be voiced for small films: short films, underground and experimental films. However, these films are increasingly finding alternative ways to get their work exposure: limited DVD sales and posting work on the Internet YouTube and
Vimeo for example, as well as on artist's websites).
(6) A lot of the 'small' cinema from before, has become the ephemeral cinema of today: instructional films, educational films, advertisements, documentaries, experimental films, home movies etc.... These are the films that are in direct danger of extinction. Yet they are a crucial part of our cultural heritage.
(7) Many of these films fall through the cracks of history and are not part of film archives. They become 'orphan films'.
(8) A renewed interest in film preservation and the current enthusiasm to save 'orphan films' are an important side phenomenon of the nostalgia and concern about the future of film which gained momentum in the 1990s with the celebrations of one hundred years of film and with the growing possibilities of digital technology. It is only the question if, and for how long, this 'orphan film' movement will last.
(9) Filmmakers, working with the found-footage of such films, have a particular role to play in creating a growing knowledge within the public (even if it is only a cinephile audience) by acknowledging their source material, no matter how radical their use of the images (with several effects and different sound for example).
152 (10) On the other hand, these are golden times for found-footage filmmakers. Never has there been as much film-material at hand, both in kind and on the Internet, to make their work, and never have there been as many bad films out there to inspire meta-critical work.
(11) As Marshall McLuhan stated, as soon as a medium becomes obsolete, it can become an artistic tool. A couple of decades ago we saw this happen with music records: DJs played them back and forth to create new music (so-called scratching). We now see revival of similar techniques, which were already used by the Fluxus movement in the
1960s: discarded films are burned and scratched in one-time performances, or screened in layers with several projectors, like what VJs do by mixing popular music and guerrilla
TV (which is also a spin-off from the Fluxus movement). History's circle is full, only very few seem to recognize that these practices have a long history.
(12) Some parts of film history are already forgotten: the use of flatbed editing and slug- film for example. Working with these images proved a fruitful endeavour to explore alternative uses for this footage and even to discover some of the miracles than can happen working with a film-digital-video hybrid: travelling frame lines, ghost images and with the doubled images even some stroboscopic effects that might very well undo the lulling effect of the beta waves (I am speculating here).
(13) We need more crossing-over, more migrations, more mutual respect between media and their makers and users. Only then will a plea for the survival of film, and especially the films that make up its small history and which as such directly connect with the history of video, take root. There needs to be less elitism and more openness for the
153 diversity of and within media (both film and video). There needs to be more alternative voices and alternative thinkers.
(14) We need to keep on challenging the imposed notions of linear progress that automatically leap from film to digital technology without any space for different ideas of progress in cinema (small films and little histories for example). We need a resistant memory and a memory of resistance.
(15) Many texts and statements about the 'death of film' are throwing dust in our eyes.
Therefore, it is essential to stay vigilant and keep a critical stance. Scholars, educators and artists have a role to play in making sure there is resistance to simple definitions and to an all too easy replacement of film with digital technology, without care and concern for the rich history and possibilities of the medium film, including its so-called flaws such as dust and scratches...
B-ROLL: Manifesto #2: Stardust (15 minutes) (digital video)
While others are quick to declare that film is dead, this film celebrates its dust and scratches, and its magic powers for time and space travel. It is an imaginative (and ironic) plea to preserve our dying celluloid past and to fight the takeover by digital technologies.
It is a true collage film in both image and sound, with lines taken from many well-known films and TV series (all listed in the credits of the film). The sound collage is made by
Randolph Jordan (artist name Gerstyn Hayward).116 Stardust reiterates some of the drama
Gerstyn Hayward is a sound collage artist and film scholar specializing in sound for film. For more info on his work see http://www.soppvbagrecords.net/pages/gerstvn- havward.htm
154 present in the texts about the 'death of film' studied above, in particular the many deaths of film orchestrated by Jean-Luc Godard, by making similar links with our own mortality
(dust to dust), including cremations and burials. Besides the many images of film dust, the film acquires its militant tone from the use of war images.117 Some of its science- fiction references to space and time travel come from a 1970s film promoting a new fast train for ViaRail, the Turbo, which was presented as a space missile (strangely leaving earth vertically, not horizontally). I have used this film before for an earlier work
Struggling in Paradise for which I had cut it up to reprint the images on the optical printer. For the transfer to video this time around, I spliced the shots back together, but it shows: the images are more shaky than the original was. It seems as if, in these times of peril, space travel has become even more hazardous. The images of Alfred Hitchcock, which I found in a trim bin in the Nova Scotia film cooperative, were already cut up to be used as slug-film. In Stardust, Hitchcock makes a brief guest appearance as one of the few voices urging us not to panic (despite the dramatic fragmentary state of the film strip
I rescued him from). The film ends with the only moment in the entire film that sound and image are reconnected as they were in the original film: the silent slug-film images of
The Passenger are briefly reconnected with their sound (taken from the DVD). With
Maria Schneider we look forward to more dust at the other side of the frame, across that conspicuous slug-film scratch, and a troubled future that reads 'end'. It seemed prudent to entrust this film to 'Time Life films' for distribution.
117 All the war images are from the NFB film series Canada at War (1962), produced by Donald Brittain. This was one reel of 16mm footage (it is part two of the series) that I found on the racks of film available for exercises in film editing on flatbeds in the Communications Studies Department of Concordia University.
155 CHAPTER 4: FILM DECAY AS ART
4.1 Introduction
In the 1990s, concurrent with the pre-millennium discourses around the 'death of film', several found-footage projects were exploring possibilities for the survival of film as analogue film traces in the digital age. One particular category was comprised of those projects that literally show the death of film and the decay of cinema in motion by using film footage damaged by water, dryness, fungi, discolouration, celluloid acetate degradation and nitrate decomposition. Before, there was little or no interest in such images, except from some very concerned archivists.
Eric Rondepierre is one of the better-known visual artists to use these images as art. His 1995 exhibition Precis de Decomposition at the Galerie Michele Chomette in
Paris received a great deal of critical acclaim. The exhibition was a series of stills from films affected by nitrate decomposition, re-photographed and presented as photogrammes
(in the Barthesian sense).1 Rondepierre, who has a background in printmaking, discovered the blistered nitrate film images by accident and decided to print them as large photos, in the same vein as his other work: since the early 1990s, Rondepierre was already exploring the 'blind spots' of cinema and printing these as film stills.2 His intervention consisted in choosing single frames (which are normally projected at a rate of 24 per second) according to clearly defined criteria, printing and showing them as large-format photographic prints. This conceptual treatment of the moving images
Thierry Lenain, Eric Rondepierre: Un Art De La Decomposition. Singularites. Bruxelles: Lettre volee, 1999.) See: http://www.ericrondepierre.com/
156 "brings into play several different registers (text, painting, cinema, photography) with a rigor that does not exclude strangeness or humour".3 It is no surprise then that Thierry
Lehain, who makes interesting connections between Rondepierre's images for Precis de
Decomposition and various paintings throughout the history of art , also makes a most interesting link with the works of the Surrealists, such as the paintings of Rene Magritte.
Lehain recounts the little-known story about the 1929 painting La Femme
Cachee: it represents a naked woman with her face turned away, on a dark background
(see annex). The painting reads: 'je ne vois pas la' above the image of the woman, and
'cachee dans le foret' below the figure. In 1929 Magritte made this painting the central piece in a famous photo-montage published in the journal La Revolution Surrealiste (see annex). In this photo-montage he framed the image with a rectangle made of sixteen passport photos of the members of the Surrealist movement, all men, all with their eyes closed.5 In the meantime, Andre Breton had bought the painting. Soon after its purchase, for unknown reasons, it started to turn black. In a panic Breton tried to clean the painting, but in doing so the image was damaged beyond repair: the contours of the central woman figure became a web of small cracks and lines that exposed the white surface of the canvas underneath. Contrary to Breton who was devastated, David Sylvester, one of the most knowledgeable Magritte experts and the author of a key catalogue about his entire oeuvre, sees the event as a miraculous transfiguration, and not a catastrophe.6 For him it is a wonderfully poetic paradox that this accidental disappearance happened to an icon
http://www.ericrondepierre.com/pages/en formation.html 4 Many of which also show signs of deterioration in similar patterns as the blotched and cracked nitrate film images. 5 Agnes Varda actually uses this same image a couple of times in her latest film, the "autodocumentary" Les Plages d'agnes (2008). 6 David Sylvester, Rene Magritte (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1992).
157 that is precisely about the disappearance of the image (the main intention of the Magritte painting). Moreover, Sylvester describes this as one of those lucky occurrences where the natural risk that all artwork faces happens in such a way that what is lost from the original work in terms of the fragmentation and 'effacing' of the image, is largely compensated for by what the work has gained in lyrical force and suggestion. He goes even as far as to suggest that what has happened to La femme cachee is maybe the luckiest accident to happen to a work of art after the breaking of Le grand verre by
Marcel Duchamp.7
As said, Andre Breton himself seems to have been oblivious to the fact that his cleaning act had beautifully transformed the painting and made it more poetic and mysterious, which Lenain sees as the most interesting part of this story. For me though, the importance of this event lies not in the fact that the founder of Surrealism did not recognize a Surrealist event as it happened before his eyes (probably because it was created by his own hands), but the fact that the image gained lyrical and suggestive power because it was partly effaced and became crackled (like raku pottery). That was also what
Eric Rondepierre saw in the damaged frames from nitrate films. Moreover, as a printmaker Rondepierre also recognized that these images can cut time and space as only photography can, basically undoing the filmic element (the continuous projection of images at 24 frames per second) to expose—in his terminology—the blind spots of cinema. Obviously this aspect of his work, the fact that Rondepierre works with still images, sets him apart from the other artists working with decomposed film material discussed here. But before moving on to films that use damaged images as decay-in-
7 David Sylvester, cited in Thierry Lenain, Eric Rondepierre, 114. Thierry Lenain, Eric Rondepierre, 115.
158 motion, it is worth noting that despite the difference in media, there are important similarities between Rondepierre's photogrammes and the use of freeze-frames or even just slow-motion in film (both techniques that I also adopted in 1953, The B-Film Keeper, and in Skin-drums and Tattoos). Whether one makes stills, freezes the image or slows it down, all these techniques enhance the effects of the decay in the film frames, creating a more melancholic feeling (as slow-motion always does), a nostalgic sense of loss, and it creates an interesting exchange between the studium and the punctum of the images.
While the image itself moves at a slower pace, the decay creates its own rhythm and it exposes the constant amnesia of film at work, eating images away at what seems a faster pace than the original image. It makes time and its workings more visible.
Contrary to the work described here, most found-footage film artists look for images and scenes that they can use to tell their own personal stories, hence footage that is still intact so that it can be 'cited' in a different story, often parodies on the films used or other media critiques. Found-footage films with damaged images also provide a commentary on film as a medium, but it is more specifically about the materiality and fragility of film. These films remind us of all the footage that already has been lost, their images forever destroyed accidentally by chemical and material forces, or destroyed on purpose.9 Frame-to-frame transfers of these crumbling images to digital video or re-
I am referring here to destruction on purpose to censor films such as what has happened to my copy of Belles of the South Seas (1944) (see discussion of Skin-drums and Tattoos further), and not the work of filmmakers who "destroy" images on purpose for the aesthetic effects e.g. by using bleach (Jon Behrens), baking the images (Richard Kerr), letting them rot buried in the ground or dripped in blood (Louise Bourque) or sunken in the sea (David Gatten), or by burning frames as a performance (Carl Lemieux) and many other techniques. For me it is essential that the damage is "found", just as the image is. For me this gives the final film more of a documentary status than these other experimental films where the artist decomposes the image on purpose.
159 copied onto film, allow them to survive and live on, even if the films don't. Moreover, paraphrasing Benjamin,10 these films make it possible to see new beauty in what is vanishing (the lyrical effects of film decay). Andre Habib aptly described this trend in current cinema, "which negotiates a space between avant-garde practice and archival exploration", as 'poetic archaeology', or 'archival poetry'. "All these films set up an intriguing dialectic between form and content, between the imprint of the film and the material base, which manifests itself through its accidents, and its imperfections".11
Exploring new ways to work with film, especially footage that earlier was denied a status as film because of its decay or fragmented state of being, also allows one to explore the tendencies of a new era, such as the renewed interest in film preservation and archiving.
Studying some of these found-decayed-footage films, I will focus on if, and how, this work aligns itself more with film preservation and archiving than with the artistic tradition of found-footage films by comparing how the filmmakers collected their film footage and their respective editing strategies. Following that, I will describe my own contribution to this fairly recent stream in found-footage filmmaking.
"And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see it merely a "symptom of decay", let alone a "modern" symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing." Also cited in Chapter 1. Benjamin, Walter. (1936). 'The Storyteller', in Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 1' Andre Habib, "Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate." SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 35, no. 2 [110], (2006), 129.
160 4.2 Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate12 (1990).
Although not a typical collage film (except for some parts), Peter Delpeut's
Lyrical Nitrate deserves our attention as one of the first films to show off the beauty of decaying (nitrate) film. Besides, Lyrical Nitrate was an important source of inspiration for Bill Morrison, who later gained a lot of critical acclaim with his film Decasia (see
4.3).13 Peter Delpeut is a former archivist at the Dutch Film Museum in Amsterdam, which is how he got access to all the original footage for his films. Lyrical Nitrate was his first collage film. Before this film, he had made documentaries and some lesser- known drama films14. It is obvious that he uses his background in narrative film when he works with found footage, always trying to create a dramatic story that connects everything, though not always as successfully as in Lyrical Nitrate, a more coherent piece that he gave a beautiful and very suitable title.15
12 The original Dutch title is Lyrisch Nitraat. The film was released on video and DVD in North America by Zeitgeist films in 1991. 13 Bill Morrison, "Mes Films Pourriront Aussi: Interview." Liberation, June 11th, 2003. 14 His graduation film at the Film Academy in Amsterdam, Emma Zuns (1984), Stravers (1986) and Trouble Ahead(1987). Gerdin Linthorst, "Postmodern Grasduinen in De Filmarchieven."£>e Volkskrant, April 8th, 1993. 15 In his next film, The Forbidden Quest (1993), a "faux" documentary about a South- Pole expedition, he tried even more to order the original film material in such a way that the audience can experience what happened, rather than look at these images with a contemporary attitude as if they are only some kind of curiosity. But the many storylines and the long extrapolations on the dramatic relationships between the main characters, made the film so complex that it can't keep the audience engaged. The fact that this allows the viewer to ponder about how the film material survived (and not for instance the expedition ship or many of its travellers) is a good thing, but it defeats Delpeut's purpose: the film is maybe interesting but not engaging.
161 The basic footage for Lyrical Nitrate is a collection of early films formerly owned by Jean Desmet, a pioneer film exhibitor in Amsterdam. This collection, containing films made between 1905 and 1920, was discovered only in 1956 in the attic of the
Cinema Parisien in Amsterdam. The Film Museum recovered and preserved the films, reinstating them as part of the Dutch film heritage. This is how Peter Delpeut found them in the late 1980s. Upon inspection he was in awe for both the art and craft of these thirty- seven silent films and the signs of nitrate degradation in some of them. He decided to make a compilation film from them, of which some parts are more collages than others.
The film is made with footage from all the films from this one collection, which Delpeut ordered by theme. The ten chapters of Lyrical Nitrate line up either as important moments in life (e.g. childhood, love, death) or refer specifically to the life of film (e.g. early film exhibition, ways of seeing, mise-en-scene etc.). The manner in which
Delpeut ordered the many films and film-clips reveals his concern about these films being reminiscences of a dying art (cinema), even an art that has already died (silent film).17
The film starts with chapters that glorify and celebrate the discovery of film: the pleasures and wonders of early cinema going {Cinema Parisien); how people's views are
16 According to Phillip Mosley the Belgian born Jean Desmet played an important role in the expansion of film in the "low countries" (Belgium and Holland).Between 1910 and 1916, working initially with Gaumont and later with Pathe, he set-up a huge independent distribution circuit based in Amsterdam, handling nearly all the major international film companies of the days. See: Phillip Mosley. Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity. (Albany. State University of New York Press, 2001), 33.
17 Andre Habib notes that cinema for Delpeut's is always an object of loss, "and it is within this horizon of loss that most of his films are created, enshrining traces that have survived oblivion." Habib, "Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema", 122.
162 changed through the eye of the camera (Looking); the art of posing and acting (Children's
Exhibition and Mise-en-Scene); even the beginning of stardom (a chapter titled Body featuring Miss Lyda Borelli18), followed by Passio, a chapter that is a bit of an oddity in the film.19 The later chapters show the crucifixion of Christ (Dying), immediately followed by a chapter titled Flights of Fancy with images of travel and the first signs of nitrate decomposition. Delpeut ends the film with a chapter that barely shows the story of
Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, as the images are themselves more and more eaten by nitrate decomposition (Forgetting). The fact that he chose an aria from Gluck's opera Orpheus and Eurydice as the music track for the last chapter suggests even more that the film is the desperate attempt of a cinephile trying to bring his dead lover back to life. This last chapter is of particular interest to me, since the beauty of the film decay plays an important part in the story told in the film and in the story told by Peter Delpeut as the final note of his nostalgic hymn to (silent) film.
That Delpeut wants us to read this final part of the film as a statement on both the amnesia at work in film (images eaten away by chemical processes), and in our culture
Lyda Borelli, an Italian film star in the teens, was a decadent version of the Pre- Raphaelite beauty: thin, with wavy blond hair and strange but picturesque poses. She portrayed characters that were doomed and otherworldly, often bordering on the supernatural. Borellismo actually became a term used to describe the craze with the star: girls went on diets and strove to imitate Lyda's twisted postures. She is also one of the divas featured in Peter Delpeut's more recent film Diva Dolorosa (1999). This film with "divas" from fourteen films of the late teens, is also part of a book by Angela Delia Vache about early Italian Cinema titled Diva, Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, which has a foreword by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2008). 19 This part shows the heartbreak of a woman, several times repeating the action, sometimes with enlarged frames. This is clearly meant to enhance the drama that is already present in the original Italian film Gli Ultimi Giorni de Pompe'i (1908) about two love triangles in ancient Pompe'i. Following this high drama, the film just moves on with train images in the Pyrenees mountains to end with images of young gypsy girls in Spain. It is not quite clear to me what Delpeut is trying to say here.
163 (the forgotten cinema) is clear from the opening of the last chapter. After the title 'and forgetting', we first see a man in a projection booth who, for an unknown reason, lights a candle and places it in a wooden box (which actually resembles a camera obscura) next to a 35mm projector (that is not running), like one would for a vigil. High on the wall above a poster reads 'dangerous, no smoking'. He then runs around the table to peep though a hole in the wall similar to any projector window and looks out to what we can presume is the film screen. What we, the audience, get to see is the beginning of the film The War of the Flesh (1917). 'Seeing' is an overstatement, since the film suffers from severe chemical damage and the opening shows almost only veils of washed away frames in a mixture of the original bluish tint of the film and sepia tones that enhance the idea of watching images from the past. When an inter-title that is only partly readable tells us that 'Satan and Sin desecrated Eden', in thought we can easily substitute Eden with film.
In the original film Satan (male) and Sin (female) are both represented by characters that wear a snake as a garment. Sin actually becomes a snake after hugging a tree, while pursuing a teasing hide-and-seek-game with Satan. This transformation into a snake wrapped around the tree (lying in wait for Eve) happens in a hocus-pocus game of the stop-motion animation used in the original film combined with the effects of the washed away images that make it look like she goes up in smoke. After Eve is seduced by the snake to eat the apple, for a moment she seems confused about what to do, her doubt beautifully enhanced by the wobbly movements of extra active blotches and patches in the disintegrating film. The more the film and the story advances, the more Sin, Satan and film decay get their way and an inter-title that is hardly readable announces 'fruit' and
'death'. It is a vivid reminder that we are actually watching the death of film in motion.
164 That is, if we would let ourselves be (mis-)guided by the subtitles. Looking at the film
frame-by-frame, one comes across one single intact frame of the original Dutch text that
allows us to see what Sin really tells Eve: 'The first seduction: eat of the fruit, it brings
not death, but life'. The fact that the title promises life counters the interpretation above
(which is the one presented to Anglophone audiences), even if we know that the snake is
lying, as the remainder of the film tells us. When Eve has eaten from the apple of sin, she
and Adam run out of more and more washed away frames in distress, and after some
confusing glimpses of another world (heaven?), the film ends with an image of death
himself: a bearded old man with his scythe, looking in a crystal ball at the world, but not
seeing much more than coloured patches and washed away images in bluish and sepia
tones. By having death as the last image of the film, in between the flicker of the brighter
'imageless' patches, fading away with the film, Delpeut has made it clear that for him,
like for Cherchi Usai, "cinema is the art of destroying moving images."20 The fact that
this part is accompanied with the music of Gluck's opera Orpheo only enhances this idea.
Delpeut's choice of music in this film is particular. Most pieces are opera arias,
played from old recordings so that the cracking and scratching sounds of the needle on
the records enhance the feeling of experiencing something from the past, something as
fragile and sketchy as memory itself. The arias often seem chosen more to enhance the
nostalgia of the filmmaker (and by extension, the nostalgia of the viewer) than to support
the story told in the images. Luckily Delpeut has the presence of mind to also keep some parts of the film silent too. For example the Children's Exhibition, a collage with images
of children posing for the movie camera in a very similar style as the still portraits of the
Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema, 1.
165 time, and a good part of the next chapter about mise-en-scene featuring a family drama,
are silent. After the family drama, the chapter on mise-en-scene continues with a miner's
film about a failed rescue: two miners, threatened by an underground flood and lack of
oxygen, die before the rescuers can get through to them. The only thing left to do is to
drag the dead bodies out of the damaged mineshaft. Delpeut chose to couple this film
with the aria Au Fond du Temple Saint from the opera Les Pecheurs de Perles by Bizet. It
is unclear if he wants us to draw a parallel between the two miners and the characters
Nadir and Zurga from the opera,21 or if this was more a random choice.
More satisfactory than his choice of music is that Delpeut kept this silent mining
film in its entirety. Although in some parts of the film he employs more 'collage'
techniques, cutting and inter-cutting fragments of different films together, here and in
other crucial parts of the film Delpeut 'presents' us films from beginning to end, similar
to DVD compilations of silent cinema.22 As Andre Habib argues Lyrical Nitrate, a film
that in the first place could be made thanks to a film projectionist who stored his personal
collection of films in the attic of a cinema theatre, feels more like the work of an archivist
who tries to preserve the collection for digital times to come in the form of a personal edit
on DVD, even if significant parts are more like a collage film. Lyrical Nitrate "borrows
heavily from the found footage's aesthetic of ruins, while refusing its more ironic,
21 In Les pecheurs de perles {The Pearl Fishers), after Nadir returns to the village, he and Zurga recall how their friendship was once threatened when they both fell in love with an unknown priestess. To avoid this in the future, they swear eternal friendship. This is Bizet's most successful opera apart from Carmen. It is notable for its colourful and exotic orchestration, and for this great friendship duet. 22 Examples are Landmarks of Early Film (Film Preservation Associates, U.S.A., 1994), The Origins of Film (Library of Congress, U.S.A., 1993), Saved from the F lames Saved from the Flames: Fifty-Four Rare and Restored Films. (2008), DVD Compilation. (Flicker Alley) or Crazy Cinematographe (Film and Kunst GmbH, Luxemburg, 2007).
166 theoretical or visual radical aspects. From the compilation films, it retains a documentary dimension, as trace or testimony of past visual practices, while keeping those films relatively anonymous (until the end credits)."23 The latter makes it very different from
Bill Morrison's Decasia.
4.3 BUI Morrison's Decasia (2004) ^
In contrast to Lyrical Nitrate, Bill Morrison's film Decasia: The State of Decay is entirely made with snippets of footage from very different sources and eras,25 in various states of decay, and with various kinds of decay (besides different stages of nitrate decomposition, there is also damage from fungi, water, shrinkage etc.). Where Delpeut tried to show in his film the various qualities of silent cinema, Morrison shows more the various qualities of film decay (hence also the choice of the title and subtitle), and he slowed the images down to enhance the effects of decomposition on the images. More than being concerned with what the images represent (as Delpeut is), he concentrates on revealing the material fragility of film by showing the decay of the images and he has edited the film accordingly. Whereas Delpeut's film feels like the work of a collection
Habib, "Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema", 128. 24 Bill Morrison made two other (short) films with decayed footage before this one: The Mesmerist (2003) and Light is Calling (2003). The Mesmerist is a reworking of the 1926 film The Bells (loosely based on the story of Le Juif Polonais) featuring Boris Karloff. It is available in Wolphin, DVD Magazine of Rare and Unseen Short Films, no. 2 (2006). OffScreen published several articles on Bill Morrison's work, following a retrospective of his work at the Cinematheque Quebecoise in April 2004: Donato Toraro "Old Made new: The Cinematic Poetry of Bill Morrison"; Claudy op den Kemp "Plus Belle que la beaute est la mine de la beaute"; and Andre Habib "Cinema from the Ruins of the Archives. Matter and Memory: A Conversation with Bill Morrison" and "Thinking in the Ruins: Around the Films of Bill Morrison" all in OffScreen, vol. 11, no. 11, November 2004. 25 Most of the original film material comes from the Library of Congress, Washington, USA.
167 manager, Morrison's film has more in common with a feature music video: the images are edited to the rhythm and the different moods in the music track, not necessarily in a narrative relationship based on their content.
The use of sound is another important difference between both films and with most other collage films (as well as with my work). Decasia was entirely created to a modern classic symphony composed by Michael Gordon. This (at times rather monotone) symphony carries the entire film, whereas Delpeut, 'found' several music parts to accompany some of the chapters in his film. While both choices are questionable, it is interesting that both filmmakers chose a form of classical music performed in a way that expresses 'decay' on the sound track: Delpeut by choosing old opera records; Michael
Gordon by composing music for detuned instruments and adding scratchy metallic objects to the percussion section of the orchestra. The major difference is that Gordon's symphony functions as the rather gloomy glue that holds many different fragments of damaged films together (from documentary and news reels to drama). The film is built with shots, not with shorts. Morrison does so, not necessarily because this is the only part of a film left or because it makes for nice sequences to link similar shots and techniques (as Delpeut did in his film), but mostly because he has cut the films up to edit them to the flow of the music, and because he carefully picked only, the parts that are the most decayed. It therefore has become impossible for the viewer to recognize or deduce from which films, fragments are being shown.
A good example is the miner's film mentioned earlier, which is also part of
Decasia. In Lyrical Nitrate we see the whole film, in a blue dye, in fairly good condition so that we can follow the story from beginning to end. In Decasia, the film is in un-tinted
168 black and white, in poor condition (the image has faded), incomplete and split in two parts. The first part, the scene showing the trapped miners, is edited in between shots of a
Japanese film with very pronounced nitrate blisters, and images of North African wool spinners and carpet weavers. The second part, a fragment of the rescue (the carrying out of the dead bodies), is edited about ten minutes later in the film, before a collective baptism scene in a lake and right after one of the most famous images from the film: a boxer fighting the heavy film decay in the right part of the frame where his punch-ball used to be. It is needless to say that it is hard to find any narrative connection other than that these images are about hard work and struggles. Moreover, Morrison has also used other footage about mining later in the film. Since the first mining film is already cut up, it is easy to mistake these images as the continuation of the same story, that is unless one knows the film from Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate.
This makes one wonder about all the other fragments in Decasia, where they come from, how they are (inter-)cut, and especially with what purpose? The fact that
Morrison, contrary to Delpeut, does not list the titles of the films that the film fragments are taken from in the end credits, enforces the idea that for him this is not a preservation project, but more a form of collage where the degree of decay and other formal considerations such as movement, rhythm and emotional content of the shot determines the suitability and the place of the images in the final film. The original films are not
26 In his lengthy interview with Andre Habib, Bill Morrison admits that he is not making a plea for preservation and that he therefore, contrary to other filmmakers (and film archivists), does not see the purpose of listing all the film where the fragments are taken from. See Andre Habib, "Cinema from the Ruins of the Archives - Matter and Memory: A Conversation with Bill Morrison," OffScreen 11, no. 11 (November 2004), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/interview morrison.html (accessed August 5, 2008), 14.
169 presented as objects to be preserved, but numerous individual images extracted from the films are chosen for their deterioration - which is actually very beautiful to watch — and because they convey the fleeting nature of film. Therefore, whereas Delpeut, just like
Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller, calls attention to how the art of story telling from the silent era got lost, Morrison uses the decayed images to make it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. One of the merits of his film is that he has copied images of film stock so badly affected by chemical deterioration, that his copy is the only image left, since the original soon after crumbled to dust.2?
Like the mining drama cited in both films, Lyrical Nitrate and Decasia are rescue operations without a happy ending. These filmmakers lead us out of dark film vaults where film is decomposing into an unsure digital future. With Delpeut and Morrison, we can briefly look back but, like Orpheus, in doing so film is both made visibly present and forever lost. As a film teacher and historian, I rather follow the lead from Peter Delpeut out of the film catacombs, since he offers more clarity and even makes a serious attempt to 'preserve' the films as films. As a filmmaker I can appreciate Bill Morrison's creative post-modern re-composition with decayed images. As a music lover, I would rather watch both films silent.28
In the same interview with Andre Habib, Bill Morrison also talks about the procedures to make his film and the difficulties working with damaged footage, Habib, "Matter and Memory", 14; 17. 28 A shorter version of my comparative film review on Decasia and Lyrical Nitrate appeared in a special issue of Convergence. See Gerda Cammaer, "Film Reviews: Lyrical Nitrate. Directed by Peter Delpeut, the Netherlands 1990. Decasia. Directed by Bill Morrison, USA 2002." Convergence 15, no. 3 (August, 2009): 371-373.
170 4.4 Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love (1994)^
Much more in the tradition of avant-garde and found-footage films, Peggy
Ahwesh's film The Color of Love has been given little or no attention compared to
Delpeut's and Morrison's ruined cinema projects, except in Laura Marks's book on
Touch, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002) and more recently in an article on her work by William C. Wees titled "Peggy's Playhouse: Contesting the Modernist
Paradigm".30 With Delpeut and Morrison, Ahwesh shares an interest in the unpopular genres of cinema (home movies, ethnographic films, faux documentaries, in melodrama and in horror films), but the intention behind her work is very different. Whereas Delpeut is a film theorist turned film archivist, filmmaker, artist, and Morrison is a filmmaker whose work is celebrated as high-art with terms such as 'cinematic poetry' and 'sublime art'31, Ahwesh aims to make a distinctive contribution to "the dismantling of the
Institutional Canon of Masterworks of the Avant-Garde".32 Her background is more the anti-art sensibility of 1970s punk and feminism. It can be no surprise then that adding to her interests in the film genres mentioned above, she adds videogames and pornographic
I am indebted to William Wees for introducing me to this work. I had the chance to see it projected here in July 2009 at an outdoor screening organized by The Pleasure Dome. For a while there was a bootleg copy of the film available on YouTube, but it seems to have been taken down. It was obvious that it concerned a bootleg copy since the person video taping the film while it was projected, was reflected in the image. In Robin Blaetz, Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 31 Eight of his titles have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he is a Guggenheim Fellow, he has been commissioned to create films for some of the most important composers such as John Adams, Gavin Byars, Michal Gordon, Henryk Gorecki and Steve Reich, and Decasia was noted by John Hoberman of the Village Voice as "the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siecle". Laurence Weschler, "Sublime Decay." New York Times, December 22, 2002, sec. Sunday Magazine. 32 William Wees, "Peggy's Playhouse", in Robin Blaetz, Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 292.
171 films. This is how The Color of Love started: it is a film made from a decomposing
Super-8 porn film that she describes "as a menstruation film", and following that "as a lesbian vampire film." 3 Besides these distinct intentions supporting her film (and behind her work in general) and its rather graphic content, The Color of Love also differs aesthetically from Delpeut and Morrison's work because the original footage is a 1970s
Super-8 colour film (presumably reversal film which has an even more saturated look than regular colour negative film) from which the emulsion has been washed away by water. This is a very different look than the blisters and deformations of the (black and white) nitrate films used by Delpeut and Morrison.
Ahwesh obtained the original film through a friend who dropped off six boxes of cans and reels that had been left out in the rain. Among them there was only one reel of
Super-8 film. Ahwesh slowed the images down on an optical printer, other parts she speeded up, she repeated parts and added a purple filter to give the film more intense
(psychedelic) colours. However, the undulations, the emulsion decay on the sides and sometimes all the way into the centre of the film were all part of the original damaged footage. Also part of the original footage is the rather bizarre 'story' of two women who fail to arouse a man who seems to have passed out (or is he dead?). He lies on the bed passively, not responding to any of their touching of his leg, chest or genitals, even when they try to mount his always-limp penis. Meanwhile the two women continuously engage in various sexual activities with each other, and the "dirt, scratches, and decomposing
Cited in Wees, "Peggy's Playhouse", 301.
172 emulsion produce a kind of accidental censorship that replaces sex organs and sex acts with pulsating abstract patterns and vibrant colours."34 As Wees observes:
By frequently obscuring part or all of the actors and their interactions, [the deterioration] works against the kind of clear and unambiguous representation of sexual organs and sexual acts that producers of pornography strive for and consumers of pornography expect...As the densely textured, brilliantly coloured, fluid, fluctuating patterns of decay flow in and out of the frame, they become tropes for the intricately layered tissues of the vagina, and as they expand and contract, they literally reframe the mise-en-scene and action. Assisted by Ahwesh's step-printing (and tango music by Astor Piazzolla on the soundtrack), they endow the film with rhythms, shapes, and textures that are the antithesis of the rigid, erect, penetrating and ejaculating phallus of mainstream pornography. It is almost as if, in a metamorphosis more bizarre than anything David Cronenberg has concocted, the actual, physical strip of film is turning into a vagina.35
Although she has set out to write sensuous theory, Laura Marks's visual reading and analysis of Ahwesh's film is not as imaginative as Wees's: she interprets the images as if the film itself takes active part in what is going on, stating that "choreographed by the tango, the film's emulsion flowers and evaporates, giving itself up to bliss and to death." According to Marks, "the real erotic activity in the The Color of Love is not between the actors but in the game with death taking place on the surface of the film." I would not go as far to say that the film decay takes over and switches the meaning of the film to a dangerous game with death (Tanatos taking over from Eros),38 especially not for this film. After all, of all the films described here39, The Color of Love is by far the
' Wees, "Peggy's Playhouse", 303. 35 Ibid., 304. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.). 37 Ibid., 100. -JO I suspect Susan Sontag would also qualify this as too much interpretation. Laura Marks also refers to Lyrical Nitrate in her introduction.
173 liveliest and most psychedelic; the film as a very colourful (damaged) carrier
energetically contributes to the bliss, and it makes us forget its decay or any other
reference to death. The only death imagined in this film is 'la petite mort', and the only
real death represented is the passed out male character. In all fairness, Marks's reasoning
is understandable given that her point of departure for the chapter, in which Ahwesh's
film serves as one example among others,40 is the idea that there is a direct relationship
between the fascination with disappearing images or images that are decayed in some
way, and our own faith as human beings. As she explains:
I suggest that identification is a bodily relationship with the screen; thus when we witness a disappearing image we may respond with a sense of our own disappearance. Cinema disappears as we watch, and indeed as we do not watch, slowly deteriorating in its cans and demagnetizing in its 41 cases.
I personally do not see things this way, but as described in Chapter three, this
metaphorical link with our own death is not uncommon. Other authors, Jean-Luc Godard
in particular, have described cinema as having a body and mortality very similar to ours.
But Marks is right to point out that there is a direct link between the level of deterioration
of the work in question and its (past) recognition. "The less important the film or tape
(and by extension, its potential audience) was considered, the less likely that it will have
been archived with care, and thus the more likely that the rediscovery of the object will
be such a bittersweet pleasure."42 This is why the categories of film most at risk to film
decay, demagnetization or digital rot, are independent, experimental, rare and (other)
40 Besides The Color of Love she also describes film, video and performance work by Phil Salomon, Mike Hoolboom, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Steve Reinke and Laurence Brose. 41 Laura Marks, Touch, 92. 42 Ibid., 93.
174 orphaned films. As Marks also remarks, with its disappearance the film accumulates aura.
"Mechanically reproduced images supposedly lack aura, but as images decay they become unique again: every unhappy film is unhappy after its own fashion."43 What she refers to, is that the damage done to each copy of a film is different and tells something
(no matter how limited) about the history of that particular film print. The discovery of a damaged film is indeed unhappy, but at the same time it can be an exciting and happy instance: that is how I experienced this process. For a filmmaker, damaged film prints open interesting possibilities to tell stories about that particular film, playing with the story it told to tell something about its own history (for example how it was damaged), as well as playing with ideas about the history of film as a function of loss (as Cherchi Usai pointed out) since that is what film decay hints at on a metaphorical level. This reading obviously complements the visual pleasure that film decay also creates, its effective lyrical (and sometimes but not necessarily melancholic) capacities. For the filmmaker, working with the material frame by frame, this extra poetic value that film decay brings to the film image, is the icing on the celluloid cake: like a new aura.
4.5 Gustav Deutsch Film 1st (1998/2002/2004): part 4.1 Material
A masterpiece that will keep celluloid's memory alive for future generations, showing its particular strength and fragility both in form and content, is the 12 part short film series Film 1st by the Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch. It is the most complete creative search for film's particularities as a medium of which I am aware.44 In twelve
^ Ibid., 94. 44 I am not alone with this. Tom Gunning who wrote an essay for the DVD, is quoted on the back stating: "It is, in a word, glorious... what I feel is the inherent power and
175 short found-footage films, Deutsch methodically explores how film communicates and transforms time and space, images and sounds, and the entire scale of human emotions.
The film is presented as a research project with chapters and sub-chapters: the various topics are systematically listed and worked out as little essays. This film had a profound impact on me when I saw the first part in 1998 (F ilm I st 1 -6). This first series of shorts is made almost exclusively with sequences from science films, which is probably where the idea of presenting this study of film structured as a scientific project comes from. But his collage of films is so much more:
Film 1st. - approaches the principles which lie at the foundation of the media. This project does not claim to be a theoretical work, but tries, on the basis of extensive work with the subject, to track down some of the building blocks of perception and some of the effects of moving images. The product is neither a scientific analysis nor documentation but rather an artistic experiment. The gaze back to the beginnings of the medium is meant to be focused in the present by its use of contemporary means (montage techniques, loops, soundtrack, etc..) and at the same time to face the direction of the future. 45
In other words, the film combines contemporary methods with old-fashioned material, in such a way that it points to future possibilities: an afterlife for film. It is like a combined history-book-user-guide for future generations. Gustav Deutsch himself explains that film is so many things at once that a "catalogue of what it can be" must necessarily remain open. Hence he describes his work as a "tableau film" and "work in progress,"46 and he ends the series with the line 'to be continued'. Note that defining his work as a catalogue mystery of such material, the arrangement of these images and sounds into a definition of cinema constitutes one of the greatest pedagogic films I have seen... my main reaction is to have my socks knocked off." Tom Gunning, "Film 1st. A Primer for a Visual World" back cover of Film 1st DVD (Vienna, Index, 2007). 45 "Introduction: Film 1st, Attempt and Approach". In Film 1st DVD Booklet (Vienna, Index, 2007), 3. 46 Ibid., 11.
176 of what film can be, points to two alternatives: what film is beyond what we always get to see (the mainstream) and what film can be beyond its contemporary use (film as we have known up to now).
In the second series, Deutsch continued his study with an exploration of moving images from the first thirty years of cinema (silent film) (Film 1st: 7-12). Contrary to the first series where the films are linked and contrasted based on formal elements and technical content, the second series takes form as a sequence of events linked by emotions that we recognize from the different genres in film: slapstick, amusement, melodrama, suspense, everything between foolishness, drama and destruction. As Stefan
Grissemann has observed, contrary to other work with old images, in all these films:
The undead, the resurrected are busy in the images which Deutsch has found. The infant cinema soundlessly reproduces whatever chanced over its way at the time. What once appeared as real in front of it, is reproduced as faded reflections of light. Deutsch's compilation manifests an unrestrained love of the material from which cinema is made - the part that can be touched, the worn matter itself. Its images are lovingly tinted, scratched, fogged - crystal clear or with a fantastic patina. The attraction of the unstable raw material of cinema is just as diverse (and in the end just as inexplicable) as the pleasure gained viewing films themselves.47 (my emphasis).
A good example is the very last collage of images in Chapter 12: a compilation of news footage of fires and rescues (e.g. the Grand Hotel and a box-board company) combined with images from a silent drama about the rescue of a woman from a burning house. The latter images are tinted in a fierce red, and they are, more than the other footage, affected by the use and aging of the film stock: they have blisters as if themselves burned by the heat of the fire. Therefore, more directly than the images of a mine rescue in the films of
Stefan Grissemann, "Films", 13.
177 Delpeut and Morrison, these images also hint to the necessity to rescue film itself. That
Deutsch has intended it this way, is obvious from the fact that this is the last part of
Chapter 12, titled 'Film Is: Memory and Document'. The fire rescues are part number
12.4 of this chapter. The other half, Part 12.2, shows a cameraman at work. He films random people, celebrities as well as ordinary people, even another camera man and himself as a reflection in a door window, eternalizing all this with a big smile and encouraging hand gestures from behind his camera. Chapter 12 has no other parts: part
12.1 and 12.3 are 'forgotten', while 12.2, the cameraman at work and 12.4 with the rescues are the documents and memories of (in?) film. This is also obvious from the sound. The images of the camera man at work (12.2) are edited to the searching sound of radio waves, punctuated by many beeps (Morse code?), as victorious signals for each great find (every new portrait, as documents of life). The rescues from the fires on the other hand, are accompanied by what I assume is the raw sound of the silent film: the sound of the filmstrip itself recorded by the optical reader of a sound projector. It is difficult to be sure about how Deutsch made the sound, but in any case it is a much more fleeting and wavy sound that evokes both the fragile state film is in and its huge heritage of ghostly images great and small, more or less affected by the workings of time, like any memory. In a way this 12th chapter about what 'Film Is' can be seen as a combination of spirit photography with the continuation of Thomas Edison's unfinished experiments to create an apparatus to give the dead a better way to communicate with us than tilting tables, ouija boards and mediums48. It is exactly this constant inquisitive quality of
Deutsch's work that I find attractive: his films all express a loving interest for the
See for example: http://www.cthauntings.com/edison.html
178 medium, its material and its history, but without being overly nostalgic or melancholic, or showing signs of a saviour complex. Contrary to some of the films discussed earlier, his work shows a compassionate respect for the found images that is rare in (experimental) film.
While Deutsch's work is more didactic, it is never in a boring or dreadful way. On the contrary, the films move along quickly, they are always fresh and playful, full of surprises and wonderment. In this sense his work bears strong resemblances to some
Surrealist films, and some of his techniques directly go back to the Surrealists, such as the use of irrational enlargements. If the material he used (particularly in his first series) rarely contains great works of art, Deutsch extracted from these authorless and neglected instructional and scientific films, moments of unbelievable beauty and grace, but also of bewilderment and even horror. If as a whole this film is one large series of 'studiums', there are in each segment also amazing 'punctums', some of them evoked by Deutsch's imaginative editing. In Chapter 3 for example, titled 'Film Is: An Instrument' Deutsch works with films about experiments with sound, voice and hearing. In part 3.1 several singers are recorded and initially these images are combined with the original scientific footage of pulsating signals, x-ray footage of the workings of ear and tongue, and macro images of vocal chords in action. But then Deutsch switches strategy and when a (rather dorky) teenager sings a song about how she 'will fly to you' we see experiments with a beetle, making it jump as high as possible. When next an alto sings a dark song about death,49 images of experiments with airbags and dummies in car crashes take the basic sound-experiment to a whole different semantic level. He ends the part by repeating the
49 I suspect it is one of Mahler's songs on the death of children (Kindertotenlieder), but I was not able to verify this.
179 word 'death' (der Tod) over and over on dummies crashing into dashboards and car seats.
In part 3.2 Deutsch continues with this editing strategy, but in a less dramatic tone. A woman with a raster projected on her face, is the subject for a study of speech. The movement of her mouth is filmed from the outside and inside with x-ray cinematography.
While she asks us "how so is that one of the stones I found in winter somewhere else?" and repeats the words 'stones' and 'winter', we see images of floating and dancing drops of liquid mercury. The dry test and text becomes part of a mesmerizing visual haiku.
A key part of Deutsch's film series for me is Chapter 4, 'Film Is: Material' and particularly part 4.1 made with outtakes of a colour film that (from what I can see) dates from the late 1970s, early 1980s. I am assuming these are outtakes, because each shot is very brief, incomplete in fact, and carries notes with arrows such as '240 - 1', '224 - 2',
'233 - 4', which I assume are the original numbers of the shot list (shot number 240, 224,
233) and the various takes (respectively, take 1, 2 and 4). These numbers are written on the film as guide for (or by) the editor. This is obviously a part of cinema we rarely get to see: all the work literally behind the 'scenes'. This alone makes this an interesting part of
Deutsch's film study. But more important is that all these images suffer from severe vinegar syndrome50. When cellulose triacetate begins to decompose the acid produced
50 When cellulose triacetate begins to decompose for example because the film is exposed to heat or humidity, 'deacetylation' occurs: the acetate ion reacts with moisture to form acetic acid. This produces a vinegar odour when the can is opened, hence the name of this form of film decay. Once the reaction is started, it cannot be stopped. Mere presence of the odour does not mean the film has degraded, but rather that the reaction is taking place. But the reaction is continuous, and once started, it cannot be stopped or reversed: the reaction is autocatalytic (it feeds on itself and speeds up over time). For more info about this and possible solutions for preservation see: http://www.imagepermanenceinstirute.org/shtml_sub/actionplan.pdf
180 reacts with the dyes in colour films, causing dye fading and damage to both the image as well as the base. Deutsch re-filmed the images on an optical printer, frame by frame, as stills (I am assuming because of the fragility of these damaged film images). It is interesting that he included the movement of the film from frame to frame as they are advanced on the optical printer, as well as the sound of the machine. This rhythmical clicking of the frame-by-frame movement of the film projector on which the images are filmed, forces the viewer to keep up with the quick gliding movements through a landscape of coloured patches, deteriorated faces, fungi-like shapes and crusty abstractions, patterns very similar to those in The Color of Love. Deutsch presents us the damaged images in a much more mechanical manner than Ahwesh did (no tango music and added colour for a more psychedelic effect), and yet despite this approach and the much more dry content of the original footage (what looks like outtakes of a business training film) here also the decay of the film creates a lyrical and poetic effect that mesmerizes and speaks to the imagination of the viewer. The rhythmical sound of the optical printer works wonders in accompanying these images, and makes the whole part a hypnotizing experience. It is just one of the many examples in Gustav Deutsch's Film 1st of how he, as Tom Gunning states, "produces a survey of what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious, all those visual elements the human sense might register, but only the camera can actually image."
He explains:
The process of excerpting and slowing down, of isolation and pointing out, that occurs in this film, makes us pay attention to those moments in films we might ordinarily ignore in favour of an intentional message or concept, or an intriguing narrative. All the little twitches of film, the equivalents of involuntary tics and parapraxes an analyst notices in a patient, are here displayed for any viewer to concentrate and learn from.
181 Viewing becomes a process of conscious discovery of that which has been relegated to the margin of our attention, and the unused reaches of our archives. Deutsch bring to light not only the forgotten moment, or aspect of film, but films which have themselves been forgotten, even discarded.51
That is why this film has a prominent place in this thesis as a great example of a 'memory of resistance' for film. Besides the attention to detail, the quirkiness of the editing and the originality and intriguing content of the footage used, the way Deutsch works with sound reveals his incredible craftsmanship and understanding of the medium of film. In what follows I present my own contributions to the survey of the optical unconscious of film, a similar analysis of film as a patient with interesting tics, but also with more and more signs of amnesia and other geriatric diseases, as well as signs of physical abuse and neglect.
4.6 The B-Film Keeper (16mm transferred to digital video, 12min 44s.)
The original footage for this film is a silent German educational film on beekeeping and honey making. I found it in a scrapheap of hundreds of damaged 35mm film copies in the National Film Institute in Maputo (Mozambique) in 1999 (see photo in annex). This was one of the rare 16mm films in the pile. All these films were damaged by fire and water from the fire extinguishers after rebels had attacked the institute, which is
(was) the biggest film archive and one of the rare film labs in Africa. I was there at the time to work on my MFA thesis. I actually used some of the images in a documentary
51 Tom Gunning, "Film 1st: A Primer for a Visual World" in DVD Booklet of Film 1st, op. cit., 10. 52 It is worth noting that there is very little known about the state of the film heritage in poorer countries. The way we can discuss and fuss about saving our crumbling celluloid past in the west is a luxury many other countries can't afford. This is where I want to turn my attention in the future.
182 about the 'Instituto Nacional de Cinema' and its sad history, but that video was neither finished nor released. When I watched this damaged black and white film for the first time there, on the only working Steenbeck of the I.N.C., I was immediately struck by the idea that I was witnessing the afterlife of film. At the time, I was not familiar with the work of Peter Delpeut or Peggy Ahwesh, but I saved the images to make a film with them when I could find a way to transfer them properly to either video or film. The film is very brittle, so that was not a given. Thanks to the tele-cine transfer facilities at Ryerson
University, and a lot of goodwill on the part of Susan Naughton the technician (always ready to experiment with me), I could get started.
We transferred the images frame-by-frame twice, once with a slightly broader frame than usual so that the damage in between the sprockets shows, and once as a strip of three frames with black strips on the side, to show even more how the water damage
(the white patches) travels over the film's edges across several frames. I combined both framings in the film, at one time even inserted one into the other to double the effects of the damage around the edges (this is a first difference with other films that use decayed footage). Earlier (at Concordia) I had recorded the sound of the film decay on a small tele-cine, simply by letting the optical sound device of the projector read the washed away pattern on the side of the film where normally the sound track would be. In this case there was no original sound since it is a silent film, which made for a nice, clean recording of the film-decay-sound: this became the basis for the whole soundtrack.
A friend in Europe who really liked my video sent it to ARTE to ask for a postproduction grant and a TV release. They declined but not even three months later ARTE broadcast its own documentary about the topic. This experience was such a major discouragement for me that I never completely finished the piece. The one part they never got was the B-Film though: I brought that back in my back-pack, and I am very glad I saved (for later).
183 Since the film is about bees, I also recorded bees in summer fields (hence the crickets) and researched several sound libraries for specific bee sounds. The damaged film, the bees and the crickets are sounds that mix really well together. At particular moments in the film I have added sound effects in a Jacques Tati-like manner, exaggerating some of the things present in the image (e.g. a camera or a hammer) or giving the images sounds that do not belong to them (e.g. the sound of an old hand- cranked 35mm movie camera on the turning of the honey extractor). To break the harshness of the damaged film sound and of the predominantly mechanical sounds, I added more lyrical components by using fragments of the film score of Alien (1979) - which adds drama - and some happy birds, even a happy whistle for the B-Film Keeper himself to give the film a lighter tone. Throughout the creation of the soundtrack, my main challenge was to keep a balance between the realistic and non-realistic sounds, between the mesmerizing effects of the continuous decayed film and bee sounds and then the added, more gimmicky, sound effects. In any case I wanted to avoid the overused
(and easy) solution of just putting an existing piece of music on the whole film (which is a second major difference with the first three films described earlier).
The two major themes of the B-Film Keeper are the nearing disappearance of analogue film and a possible extinction-of the honeybees.54 In 2009 they both figured on
A major concern is the so-called colony collapse disorder, a term for the many abrupt disappearances of the worker bees from beehives. A possible explanation for this phenomenon is environmental change related stress, among other things caused by cell phone radiation and genetically modified crops with incorporated pest control. For more details see "Honey Bee Die-off Alarms Beekeepers, Crop Growers and Researchers", in Science Daily, April 23rd, 2007. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070422190612.htm. accessed June 4th, 2009.
184 a list of "twenty-four things that will become extinct in the next decade." Despite the impression one can get from this thesis, the problems of the bees are as important to me as the disappearance of film. Because this silent film allows me to tackle both topics, I have become very fond of it in the ten years since I saved it from that scrap heap of film in Maputo. At the end of the film, I included an excerpt of the writings of the Belgian bee specialist and apiarist Maurice Maeterlink, because he makes interesting links between the life of bees and human society and his texts add yet another level of complexity to the film, as well as a spiritual dimension.
Not up front but in the background of the making of this film, there was always also the link with the age-old symbol of the beehive as a centre of creativity. It is therefore often a symbol for artist cooperatives and figures in architectural models as a
"temple...of creativity"56. It was when reading about this fascinating history, that I discovered the movable frame beehive: an invention that is bookmarked as a revolution in beekeeping. The (re-)movable frames allow the beekeeper to get to the honey frame by frame, which makes extracting the 'liquid gold' a lot easier. As a filmmaker the idea of a
Andrew Morrison, Scout Magazine Vancouver, January 8 , 2009. Online Post, see: http://scoutmagazine.ca/2009/01/08/24-things-about-to-go-extinct/ Accessed June 22nd, 2009. This blog-posting is actually based on one of those chain e-mails and the same list figures also on other websites. 56 The most famous one is the artist collective and studio complex La Ruche in the Passage Dantzig (15th Arrondissement) in Paris, a house build by Gustave Eiffel for the World exhibition of 1900. Alfred Boucher, a fireman and sculptor who wanted to help artists by providing them with cheap studio and exhibition spaces and models, founded the artist coop in 1902. It was a vibrant place that housed artists such as Fernand Leger, Guillaume Apolinaire, Amadeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera and many others. It went into decline during the Second World War. Due to the real estate boom of the 1960s, it was almost demolished, but with the support of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Renoir and others, it was saved and revived as a collective artist studio space. Juan Antonio Ramirez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudi to Le Corbusier. R. Tulloch (trans.) (London, Reaktion Books, 2000), 70-76.
185 movable frame speaks volumes, so I replaced the first German inter-title, which read 'the beehive', with 'movable frames'. I made similar replacements for all the other German inter-titles and added one extra to cut up a rather long 'chapter' in the film. I placed the text each time in a typical silent movie title-frame to give the film a more drama-like look, and less a didactic one as was the case in the original film.
Initially I was going to use the film as it is, with only its own images and sound
(the damaged film sound). But I learned from test screenings that I was the only one with the patience to watch the film as such. New technology came to my rescue. From a huge film archive on the Internet that includes many films about film,571 was able to download a film titled The Facts about Film (Atlanta Board of Education and the International Film
Bureau, 1948), an educational film for home use explaining how to treat film, and another short film explaining How to use your 8mm camera (dir. Paul Burnford, 1953)
CO with lots of do's and don'ts. Inserting clips of these films into the damaged film frames of the bee film (sometimes superimposed, other times inserted fully) allowed me to enhance the storyline about film being threatened with extinction, as well as side themes such as film decay and film preservation. There are even some happy 'coincidences' where, no matter how different, the two themes overlap and connect. In the section about the (movie) queen, the woman, who in the original film Facts about Film is bothered by the scratches on her image caused by the mishandling of the film-stock or by not loading the film properly, is once inserted in the bee film also bothered by a bee. Consequently
57 http://www.archive.org: this archive contains among other collections the films of the Prelinger Archives. Founded in 1983 by writer filmmaker Rick Prelinger in New York City, the Prelinger Archives is a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" films: advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films. See: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger 58 A peculiar detail is that this small 8mm film was produced by the Hollywood 35mm Film Company.
186 the film-scratches can now refer to either the flying pattern of the bee, or to the need to scratch after being stung by a bee. At another moment in the film, the ignition of a nitrate filmstrip is inserted in a series of close-up images of the bees, as if the burning film and its smoky trail is the fumigator used to stun the bees. One clip that is a bit of an oddity in the film is a short fragment of the documentary Race to save 100 years (dir. Scott
Benson, 1997) in which we see an employee of the early Mayer Studios putting film reels in wooden cases, ready to be sent off or to be stored. I added a 'B' where it says 'films' on the box, a reference to the fact that the time to save films is highest for non- mainstream and ephemeral films such as all those used in the B-Film Keeper.
It is obvious that I have imposed my concerns about the death of film on this bee film, in part with the title(s) and the sounds, but most definitely by inserting the images from the films-about-film. Yet, I hope that by doing so the death-of-film-theme did not hijack the entire film. I am conscious that the obvious signs of water damage on the sides of the film act as film-decay-in-motion and thus actively and constantly confront us with the fragility and mortality of the medium film. But as in the other work with decayed film, the damage also gives the film a lyricism and a surreal look not present in the original film, which works very well together with the film's original theme of honey making. All along the film's irregular blotches and bleached patches dance along nicely with the bees, buzzing and swarming like they do. At times even phantom sprocket holes drift in and out, as virtual honeycombs, maybe a place where the bees can store their own family pictures and home movies. These moments are the closest one can get to experiencing afterimages, not just about film, but also on film. Towards the end, the film- damage becomes so rhythmical and outspoken in image and sound that it becomes like a
187 spiritual dance with the ghost-like bee-keeper, who as a good apiarist and film-archivist, packs and covers his treasures before leaving the frame for good.
4.7 Skindrums and Tattoos - A Mutilated Film
(16mm film transferred to digital video, 5min 37s.)
My film Skindrums and Tattoos draws from a film from about the same period
(1930s - 1940s) but of a very different style. It is made with a damaged screening copy of
Belles of the South Seas (Castle Films, 1944) This film is only in a minor way affected by accidental material damage: some frames show the rusty dots of a fungus, like brightly coloured rain drops on the black and white image (see film still in the annex). But that is not the focus (or punctum) of this film that I titled Skindrums and Tattoos inspired by the old fashioned white-centric voice-over.59 This particular copy of the film was 'damaged' on purpose by a prudish soul who had trouble dealing with all the naked breasts in the film. He or she scratched out every single frame in which we see the indigenous people in their authentic outfits. As such the film actually shows resemblances to found-footage and other experimental films that scratch the surface of the film for aesthetic purposes, in order to give the image more texture and rhythm. Here we get the same effect, but the scratching is more intriguing, both irritating and amusing. The person who did this (and who must have had the patience of an angel) was very thorough, yet at times he or she has skipped or overlooked frames, defying the purpose of censoring the film. Moreover, sometimes by accident, he or she scratched the torsos of men: an understandable mistake
There is silent version with inter-titles available of this film on YouTube, for sale as stock footage. That copy seems to be a clean copy, but it is not half as interesting as mine. See http://www.yourube.com/watch?v=NEi 1 FOsTE24
188 because a 16mm frame is rather small to see the difference between men and women. I found this rather comedic, which I enhanced by editing this to a part in the voice-over mentioning a similar 'mistake' made by the camera in the original film.
For this piece I used only the original voice-over text (and music) as a guide track.
It is simply shortened and re-edited to fit the scratched images and to expose both the small-minded original ethnocentric voice-over (by extension some dated practices in ethnographic filmmaking); and the meticulous censoring of the film by an individual who owned this print of the film at some point (by extension inappropriate prudery). In
Skindrums and Tattoos I complicated things by mixing up the voice-over explanations about the origins of tattooing and an explanation of weaving practices so that they can refer to the scratching of the images as well. This play on double meaning runs through the whole film. I also created a link between the content of the images and reflections on the particularities of the medium film, by doing something similar to what Gustav
Deutsch did with the optical printer in Film 1st. I incorporated the full shots of the frame- by-frame transferring process that I had used for the scratched images to create freeze- frames for each of them. This means that I left the parts in where we see the tele-cine move the film to the next frame, and thus the frame jumps up and down to the next image. These rhythmical moves I used both for a ceremonial dance in the middle of the film, and for the final dance, a devil dance. At that point the voice-over has told us everything about superstition and 'mumbo-jumbo,' and by the end when it concludes that
"here the light of civilization is as dim as the fading light of the South Seas" (sic.) the
Since I found this copy in Quebec, I assume that it was a catholic school copy and that this is why it was censored.
189 viewer is left seriously wondering which civilization is suggested. It is good to remember that there are also a lot of dark moments in film history worth studying.
To create a link between this truly dated film, and recent developments in media, I added an introduction to the film with William Castle announcing a form of interactivity in film: the audience can determine the fate of the main character themselves. Interesting enough, in some of the images of the film he was promoting, the main character has suffered the same fate as the people from the South Seas: most of the frame is scratched out. In a shot of another film from the Castle Films promotion reel, a man's face is also scratched out. I used these as a way of correcting history a bit, by having white men suffer the same fate as the 'belles' in Skindrums and Tattoos. To end, I also added a little moment of vox populi to set things 'straight'.
4.8 1953 (8mm film transferred to digital video, 6min 22s).
This short film is made with 8mm footage shot by Nelle Mertens, an amateur filmmaker from Belgium, and my great-great uncle. The title is the original title, the only information on this mysterious unedited roll with images of adult women all dressed up as brides. Each of the women is accompanied by (mostly) an elderly woman, also nicely dressed up, with black coats and hats: the images seem to be shot on a cool spring day in the country. Most of the women and their companions come out of the house, pose for the camera and walk away on a garden path. This pattern is repeated by each of them.
Mertens shot them each time twice coming towards the camera, and finally from behind when they are walking down the garden path. The entire reel contains this rather surreal footage. At first sight it is difficult to figure out what was happening that day: were the
190 women off to their wedding? A collective baptism? Initiations as nuns? Processionists?
Actors in a local theatre play? The footage is very intriguing, and that is why I couldn't resist working with it. After some digging, I found out this was simply a bunch of friends and family having fun dressing up like brides, one among them being Nelle Mertens himself: he is in the opening shot of the film, and poses as the last 'woman' for the camera, talking to someone outside of the frame. I enhanced this position as both one of the players in the film and as the main camera man (I am even assuming the person who took the initiative for this masquerade), by combining his final pose as one of the brides with an image I discovered at the end of another roll of film: an auto-portrait of Nelle
Mertens filming himself in a mirror (or a window?). The entire film thus becomes a reflection on how easy it is to misread older film footage and the circumstances or the purpose of the making of a film. Home movies are especially prone to such mistakes.
Contrary to other films, they rarely come with production notes or a synopsis describing the film. While this is a good lesson in history, it is also a dream situation for a found- footage filmmaker interested in a more Surrealistic aesthetic61. Since I know that this is a costume party, and not some obscure religious ritual I couldn't place, I felt a lot freer to work with the images and create a film that addresses issues I care about, while remaining playful and absurd.
For the entire film, I slowed the images down. This gives them a more poetic feel, and it allows us to concentrate on the small gestures. It is especially interesting to see how the accompanying women re-arrange the costumes of their 'brides', making sure their veils are hanging correctly after the wind rustled with it for example. The slower
The images of the women immediately reminded me of the female figures in the paintings the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994).
191 pace also allows us to see their facial expressions, the smiles for the camera, sometimes a silent mumbling or even grumbling. Within this aesthetic I chose to freeze the images when they are damaged in any way (scratched, broken, patched or spotted) as to emphasize the fragility of the images and of that particular moment, like a fun memory.
At times this created a special effect (without being one), for example when a dark blotch appears on Nelle Merten's white bridal dress, right where his heart is, like his heart leapt up with joy. At the end of each portrait of one of the brides and their mates, I also froze the image and had that image fade to white: a reference to their fleetingness and their rather ghostly appearance. Earlier in the film they thus all dissolve into oblivion, only to return happily at the end of the film walking away from us down the garden path, to the refrain of a famous Flemish tune that goes 'we are not going home, not by a long way'.
Indeed, they are happily having a second life thanks to Nelle Mertens and his camera: the show can go on.
If the editing of the images was more a technical issue, the creation of the soundtrack for this piece went through various stages and many versions. My very first idea, to add some typical country birds (only indigenous species of Belgium, birds typical for open areas such as gardens and fields), worked best. It was a pleasure to see how some of the sounds coincided with small movements in the images, or even how some of the bird twitter was fitting nicely with the voiceless chatter of the women (which is what I aimed for in the editing by shifting certain parts, or changing their pace to make them more synchronous). The montage sequence with freeze frames of all the women as a portrait gallery before they walk away into eternity, is edited on the rhythmic sound of the chiff-chaff (Phylloscopus Collybita) that goes very well with the sound of a windmill
192 blade. Although this might already sound unusual, the true weirdness of the soundtrack is in major part due to the guide-track I chose to incorporate with the Belgian birds: the sound of the Amazon rain forest, with the cry of a musician wren {Cyphorhinus
Aradus), a peculiarly melodic sound. The soft rain and other sounds that it comes with also fit well with the rather gloomy images and the Belgian context, and create a lively background for this Surrealist piece. By creating this soundtrack for the images, adding the effects and doing some re-editing of the images, I hope to have made a film that is both new and refreshing, as well as a true ode to the work of Nelle Mertens and his sense of humour.
Discovering all the films by Nelle Mertens63 was a true revelation. From the late
1940s to mid 1950s, he shot about twenty reels of 8mm film, most of them edited into narrative home movies, including beautiful painted titles and inter-titles. The films were about such topics as: travels abroad with family and friends, or with the local soccer team, about working in the garden or going hunting in the woods, about cultural events, the funeral of a celebrity or, as in one his very first films, the hundreds of victims of the allied bombings of Malines (Mechelen) on May 1st, 1944. Most of his 8mm films are in black-and-white, but as one of his titles announces he also happily experimented with colour (filming close-ups of flowers in the garden for example). One of his films is an
62 The piece is from a CD with wild sounds of the Amazon Rain Forest by Richard Ranft for the British Library of Wildlife Sound (Holborne Distributing Company, 1990). It is titled "Requiem" and all proceeds went to the Rain Forest Foundation to help save animal and plant life in the Amazon, one more item to add to the short list of "things threatened with extinction". 63 He is my great-grand-uncle on my father's side. He was a veteran of WW1 of which he suffered the consequences all his life (his lungs were burned by mustard gas). He was also an active amateur painter, and many of the inter-titles in his films are actual paintings he made.
193 adorable little essay film about the four seasons. It shows all the activities that each season brings: planting potatoes in the spring, swimming in the pond in summer, hunting in the fall and a snowball fight in winter. In this film as well, the main characters had a lot of fun. His entire oeuvre is characterized by a refreshing zest for life.
All these films were stored away in a box in the attic of an uncle, forgotten by almost everyone. As a side project of this thesis I digitized Nelle Mertens' complete collection of 8mm films (frame-by-frame transfers in a specialized lab) and issued three compilation DVDs each with over two hours of material. Besides the fact that some are rare images of historic events, in itself a good reason to restore, digitize and preserve these films, Mertens' oeuvre is also the perfect illustration of the rich visual expression and natural narrative grammar that is often present in home movies (and is so rare in other films). That is why such films deserve new attention as an essential part of our cultural and filmic heritage.64
4.9 Conclusion
Works about, and working with, decayed and damaged film footage is not that new or original per se, but in recent years these type of films have gotten more critical acclaim because there is more recognition and a sense of urgency about film decay. The celebrations of the 100 years of cinema, the re-issuing of many older films on DVD, as well as the cries for help from important directors such as Martin Scorsese, have
64 This collection reinforced my interest in home-movies and I am planning to pursue this as a more elaborate research project following this first exploration of Mertens' films as part of my thesis. At this point I do not have the intention to use other parts of his work as found-footage for collage films. Especially since the edited films are great as they are. I am more concerned about finding a proper archive to store and protect this collection for the future, preferably in Belgium.
194 undoubtedly all contributed to this, and paved the way for the unbridled success of a film
like Bill Morrison's Decasia. What is different is that where before film damage was the
film archivist's best-kept secret, it now has become bon ton to throw it out in the open.
There are several strategies to do so. Peter Delpeut came forward with his work as a film
archivist and his film bears the signs of his training. Lyrical Nitrate is more a film
catalogue about a particular collection of silent films with, as final chapter, a film that is
barely visible any more. He arranged the films as a teleological progression over time.
Bill Morrison on the other hand, who also obtained the footage he worked with from
major archives but who comes from a background in painting, treats the decayed nitrate
images not as documents of the past, but as moving shapes and colours for a feature
length musical tableau that tries to be timeless, no longer recognizable as an archival piece. By using one contemporary musical track and scrambling all the images together, he ripped all the original narratives of the films to pieces, making the film decay the main focus of attention. In macabre language, if Delpeut has designed a well organized graveyard for film with clear tombstones that tell us which loving memory of which film we are seeing, Morrison has created a mass grave with anonimous victims that can no longer be identified. One thing they both achieved, is that if before film archives might have had a dull image, they now - and this beyond film studies circles - get more and more recognition as treasure houses where one can find really 'cool' stuff. This could
(hopefully) help to get new funding for these caretakers of our moving image heritage.
Filmmakers can play an active role as caretakers of film. Besides a profound knowledge and understanding of the medium, many also have privileged access to films that won't find their way to recognized film archives or are simply rejected by these
195 official institutions as not important. A good example is the creative 'rescue' of the porn film by Peggy Ahwesh, and all the films used by Gustav Deutsch for his study of what
''Film Is'. I consider myself closer to their methods and attitudes towards the found damaged film footage. I think that an essential step towards a memory of resistance is to recognize that there are many films constantly overlooked by archives (and consequently by film scholars). Recent developments in digital technology (e.g. the many alternative film collections on the Internet) are helping to correct this oversight. But it remains that small independent filmmakers, with their small private collections of obscured films, can bring these to light in creative ways that appeal to film loving audiences and bring to the front their importance as traces from our filmic past.
196 CONCLUSION: THIS IS NOT A FILM MUSEUM
Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of "nearness " it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to 'assembly'.
(Walter Benjamin, The Collector)1
Where do we stand at the end of this mission to assemble some odd bits of cinematic detritus and to reanimate the field of film studies at a time when its object is increasingly classified as dead? Is there a new role emerging for film studies? Is there a new cultural space in sight where film can reside? Is the future of film a lifetime as a museum piece, be it as folklore in history museums or as art objects in fine arts museums? What do these possibilities represent? Are there other possible options to carry film's history forward into the future: why and how? How can film transfers and film preservation be useful interventions? And what can found-footage films do? At a time when there seems to be less and less of a future for film, its past is more than ever the perfect site for artistic interventions. At the forefront of such project are its 'amateurs', the film lovers and collectors who contribute to building a practical memory - especially for small cinema: 8mm, Super-8 and 16mm films; ephemeral and 'orphan films'; the medium's overlooked images; as well as marginalized hands-on processes and forgotten practices. By doing so, these filmmakers trace an alternative history with lost and found film traces. These interventions offer a much-needed antidote against the short-
1 Walter Benjamin, "The Collector", in The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 205.
197 sightedness and small-mindedness of the dominant discourses with all their persistent declarations that film is dead, selling the bear's skin before it was shot. This was the main impetus to make a memory of resistance, my personal version of Benjamin's 'alarm clock'.2 I leave it to others to judge the effectiveness of my project as a small act of political reflection in the larger scale of things, but at least I hope to have stirred up some things.
Firstly, I have endeavoured to counter the incredible ease with which the declarations that 'film is dead' are presented to us as simple fact and imposed on all users and makers of film, great and small. Next, I have aimed to work against the grain of usual academic discourse by presenting my findings as a research-creation project that is a combination of collage work in film and in text: an interconnection of films that complement the text and vice-versa. Last but not least, by returning to the Surrealists, I hope to have undone some of the 'dead' seriousness the topic brings, and to have lifted some of the weightiness that comes with standard academic writing. Since at the end of this project there are still many questions to which I have only partial answers, in what follows I propose an auto-interview about my afterthoughts about the afterlife of film, titled: Cammaer by Cammaer.3
Q: Where do we stand now with regards to the so-called 'death of film': is there really a total take-over by digital technology happening that makes film disappear?
2 Walter Benjamin, "The Collector", 205. 3 This is partly inspired by what Jean-Luc Godard did in Godard par Godard (1993) or Chantal Akerman's parody (or homage) to him in her film Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1997).
198 A: This issue is a lot more complex. The impact of using digital technology is different for the three main stages in the film process: production (shooting); post-production
(editing and special effects); and exhibition (projection). The lack of differentiation in the literature between these three phases was one the main difficulties in trying to 'get a grip' on what is happening. Moreover, in these three phases of the production process, several different combinations between analogue and digital technology are possible. Since it is less of a concern to me as a scholar and maker, only as a concerned consumer, I leave the discussion about digital projection to the specialists. I will also avoid hyperbolic declarations and speculations about where mainstream cinema will be a decade from now. I will only talk about the things I know best: small cinema. I think that there is a very fruitful dialogue possible between using analogue film as the basic image carrier
(the shooting) and digital processes in postproduction. That is what I studied in depth for this project, mostly working with 16mm or even 8mm images. One needs to acknowledge the major difference between these small gauge film formats and 35mm. The latter is less under siege (at least for shooting and the preservation of films) but it is a very expensive medium and simply beyond the means of the small independent filmmaker. I am not against shooting on digital video, especially High Definition video, but it has a completely different feel to it. It is almost too sharp and it doesn't seem to have the same poetic qualities as film. But I have no proof for this, or enough experience: this is only a preliminary feeling. In any case, when the basic footage is found films in the smaller film formats, it is a pleasure to edit in digital. It takes a lot less time to do complicated effects, you can restore colour if the images have faded, but most of all: it makes a tremendous difference for sound. In general, I am appalled by how little people discuss sound when
199 talking about moving images. It is such a big part of it: it is, quite simply, the main
transmitter of emotions in film.
Q: Can you give an example?
A: A good example is all the work that went into the making of Skindrums and Tattoos.
The original film, Belles of the South Seas, is a 16mm film print with optical sound.
Optical sound in 16mm is really limited: one loses a third at each end of the sound
spectrum. Only the mid-range sounds are okay. There are no really high pitches or low
pitches. In other words: it is really flat. That has long been a major frustration for me. I
love the image quality of 16mm film, but I hate its sound. To get a decent sound track for
Skindrums and Tattoos, I first recorded the sound directly from the film projector, then I
ran it through some filters in Final Cut Pro to make it more clean and crisp (oddly enough
I had to compress the already compressed sound to achieve this). I then had to double the
sound and pan one of the tracks to the left so that it could become the second part (or left
track) of stereo sound: optical 16mm sound is not only flat, it is also mono (contrary to
35mm films). This was just to create the basic sound track, then all the editing still had to begin. For this film, as for most of my work, I cut the sound first, and then edited the images to it, which is contrary to general practice. In the case of 1953 I worked the other way around: this is also due to the fact that, for this film the sound editing took way longer than cutting the images. For 1953,1 worked in total with eighteen different tracks to be able to synch the various types of sounds with the images and to mix them together.
200 Q: So digital technology helped to improve the sound for the films, but did it also contribute to a better image?
A: That is a tricky question. By transferring the film images to video, I do find that they lost something, for lack of a better term, they lost their filmic character. It is like they lose transparency, depth, saturation. I would even say, they lose their liveliness. As such this whole process sometimes felt like I was committing euthanasia on the films: hence the use of 'afterlife' in the title. But in all honesty: if one can afford the high-resolution frame-by-frame transfers of a professional lab, it is more like a re-animation of the images, giving them new life, one as saturated as their celluloid life. I did this for some of the double images (since they originally were 35mm it seemed worth the cost) and for all the 8mm films shot by Nelle Mertens. The latter, I felt, was also needed as a preservation strategy. For all the other films I did the transfers myself with small and medium-size tele-cines that do not offer the same image resolution or sharpness, and that shows: there is a definite loss in quality in the image. Sometimes they seem dull, as I said lifeless.
On the other hand, in editing and working with these images as digital video, the transfers helped to create interesting new elements. I won't go into too much technical details but to go from 24 frames per second (film speed in North America) to a video signal that has 29.97 frames per second, the scanner scans for each frame alternating two and three fields (an image as a series of lines from top to bottom). This is how the machine adds 12 fields, two (one odd, one even) for each needed frame (one of the six missing). This uneven process is clearly visible in the slug-film videos with 35mm images cut in half. One can see how the frame line travels across the screen: this became the basic idea for Double Jump, where I used the travelling frame-line for the video-game
201 plot. When played as film, at 24 frames per second, these images keep an equal and
steady pattern switching between the top and bottom parts of the original 35mm frames, and we perceive them very differently. The randomness of the effect that was created in the transfer to video was a pleasant surprise: it gave all the slug-film video projects added value that would never have been possible in film. For someone interested in chance occurrences and playful effects, this was a welcome bonus of the transfer process. There are other examples, such as the enhancement of the small defects of film that I was able to single out and present as interesting 'punctums' to bring back the filmic in a different way. In general, I would say that if transferring the films at times felt like euthanasia, making the freeze frames and film stills with digital technology such as high resolution scans was a panacea: these became beautiful obituary pictures.
Q: Would you say that by transferring film to video, film loses its "magical qualities"?
A: I assume that that is the general consensus out there among fervent celluloid cinephiles, but I find it too defeatist to say so. Film is more than a light sensitive emulsion that is being exposed. Its magic also comes from what we see in the images: the ideas, the story, the places and faces, all the tiny details that stand out for their beauty or oddness, even film's blemishes. Digital transfers also allow us to work with films that can hardly be projected anymore. Most decayed films are so brittle that they would constantly break and rip. By transferring them, these films actually get a second life, one with the added energetic patterns of their damage, whether caused by water as in the B-Film
Keeper or by filmic deterioration processes such as nitrate degradation or the vinegar
202 syndrome. In these cases, the mechanical reproduction of the images added new value to films that had lost a great deal of their original appeal (for example parts of the story of the film, or recognizable faces). Although of a different nature, this is also evident from the high-resolution digital film stills or photogrammes. I often wondered what Benjamin and Barthes would write about such images and film phenomena if they had had access to this new study material. Is it possible that Benjamin would revise his idea that film is a reproducible technology? From studying film damage, it is obvious now that each film print is unique, or at least has the possibility to become so.
Working with damaged film stock is not all that new or original, but there is obviously now much more interest for this work. This is because it is now easier to transfer the films, and also because the general feeling is that film is becoming a historical medium. Digital effects that mimic film damage such as dust and scratches or even film burns, are exactly created to evoke the impression of something past, of memories. This particular aspect of digital technology is a constant eyesore for me: these effects are obviously designed by people who know nothing about film and the wonderful randomness in how it ages through use. That is why I found it important to dedicate one of the more elaborate pieces of this project to film-dust and film-scratches. But obviously, Stardust covers a lot more ground than just protesting against some hideous video effects. It is, of all the films, the one that is most a collage, even in sound: a complex layering of meaning that simultaneously comments on the various discourses about the so-called death of film, including the link to our own mortality. And most of all, Stardust is a 'call to arms' to save our crumbling celluloid past. I have started doing my part by collecting films and saving them from the trash.
203 Q: Don't film collections belong in specialized film archives?
A: They do, and in general I must say that I have a tremendous admiration and respect for the hard work that is done by organisations like the National Archives and Libraries of
Canada, or the Royal Film Archive in Brussels (two places I visited at various occasions).
But there are many other film collections that are currently at risk. For instance, public and university libraries have lots of films in their collections, mostly 16mm. But they obviously have a different mandate and operate on a different basis than national archives. The latter are trying to preserve our national history, so any film that carries a trace of 'national culture' has a fair chance of becoming part of their collection and being preserved for the future. But libraries value the importance of the items in their collections by their circulation. Hence, items that are not frequently borrowed or are no longer in demand become a burden - dead weight: they take up much needed shelf space because libraries also keep adding newer items. And that is what is currently happening on a large scale for 16mm. These library films are trashed to make space, and are often also discarded because of their deteriorated state: most colour films have turned pink, others have shrunk or have become brittle. Others again, usually the most popular ones, are duly scratched and carry several restorative splices. Anyone who has borrowed
Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice (1964) on 16mm lately, knows what I am talking about. Public libraries, I cannot really blame: no one is projecting 16mm at home anymore. After all we live in the HD-flat-screen-all-around-sound-home-movie-theatre- age. But 1 have a hard time being as sympathetic to university libraries. They are part of
204 educational institutions and thus have a different mandate altogether: they are not a consumer service; they are a service to the university and should contribute to increasing our intelligence and collective memory. But I am digressing again. I simply want to say that this whole project made me a lot more conscious about the importance of collections, film collections in particular, and their relevance as a possible afterlife for film // the medium dies out.
Q: What about film as part of historical archives?
A: Many films carry a particular history that specialized museums or archives are interested in. For example KADOC, the Catholic documentation centre in Leuven
(Belgium) has a basement full of 8mm, Super-8 and 16mm films on Flanders' Catholic past: films about its youth movements; important figures; the Catholic school system; and most of all, images shot by the many missionaries abroad (mostly in Africa, but also
China and Latin America). I am not aware of any research project that is working with this material, especially not a creative research project, but I assume that this must be a goldmine. I have definitely considered this as a possible future project, something similar to Peter Forgacs Private Hungary series. He is another filmmaker whose work I admire.
Forgacs also started with his own collection of films: in 1983 he established the private photo and films archives foundation in Budapest, a collection of Hungarian home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s. These collected films became the basis for his personal creative rewriting of history. Another example are the Prelinger Archives in the United
States, founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City: a collection of ephemeral films such as advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films, totalling about 4000
205 works. These are actually two really good examples of major 'alternative' film archives: archives that started as the project of a film lover, who saw the importance of preserving something that otherwise would fall between the cracks of history. These are important memories of resistance in their own right.
Another interesting issue is how the Internet has become a film archive. It is unbelievable (at times even overwhelming) the material that any film lover can find on the Internet. Because the films are not always presented with the best viewing conditions,
YouTube is, in this sense, both a good and a bad example of a new type of film archive.
For example, for a long time I have wanted to see Jean Vigo's early film Taris, Roi de
I'eau (1931). Well, it is now available on YouTube. Obviously, the ephemeral character of the Internet as an archive is a whole problem in itself, but I leave that to the specialists in new media. I can only say that, without the Internet, this project would have taken a lot longer to make and it would have taken a very different form. For example it gave me access to the 2000 films of the Prelinger archive that are made available on the Internet, and this in a high enough resolution for my work. The Internet also allowed me access to fragments of mainstream cinema and its many by-products that are otherwise very difficult to record or to obtain (e.g. the pod-cast interviews with Meg Ryan I used for
Double Talk), unless you spend your days watching TV with a computer hooked up
(since VCRs are now also obsolete).
Q: So what about film museums? How will film survive there?
A: Hmmmm, again a tricky question: that obviously all depends on their curatorial practices. One of the film museums I particularly enjoyed was the London Museum of
206 Film (also called Movieum of London), but upon leaving I couldn't shed the feeling that somehow there the history of film had become a combination of technical curiosities and a strict canon of classics and heroes, and that lots of interesting things were left out. I hope that if film becomes more and more a facet of history, that film museums will also become more inclusive and show more classics of ephemeral cinema and unknown heroes. I think it is important to recognize that film is a lot more than merely what is printed in the film history books. This is another possible field for intervention by film scholars. Film historians have already managed to make the history of early film more inclusive. This has been fuelled by a new recognition for the wondrous films of cinema's first decades, with the recovery of many lost treasures and the urgency that the decay of its material base (nitrate film stock) evoked among film archivists and other film lovers.
Right now all the 'silent celluloid' has more voice than all the 'small celluloid'. But there is hope: if respect and recognition comes with age and with scarcity, then I can see 16mm will get its deserved spot as a 'heritage moment' soon as well, and a bigger presence in film museums in general.
Q: Another film museum altogether, are the fine arts museums: don't we see more small films appear there? Isn't this a good evolution?
A: Yes it is, but again it seems to me that it is biased towards certain practices, notably installation work, and toward certain artists. Also, most of these works still rehash mainstream cinema and its canon (e.g. Mark Lewis) and they do not necessarily recall small films, or the small history of film. And then there is the whole issue of experimental film and how it always is somehow placed in opposition to either video art
207 or to mainstream cinema. Neither is a good position to be in, and experimental film has definitely missed occasions to be recognized as a fine art that belongs in fine art museums, even though experimental film is, at best, true film art. The lack of knowledge of programmers and curators is to blame for this, but also among experimental filmmakers there is as much a lack of historicity as there is elsewhere and that shows.
Just as in mainstream cinema, experimental film currently shows a general lack of inventiveness and creativity and a lot of 'remakes' or copies. But, contrary to Susan
Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard, both for experimental film and for mainstream film I actually have high hopes. New technologies always force us to rethink things, and what is happening now is actually a good opportunity to invent a new language.
Yet, neither in mainstream production nor in experimental film do I see people starting to take advantage of these opportunities. Similar to the "older arts", the entire spectrum of cinema or the 'seventh art' might gradually start to produce more works of what Edward Said calls 'late style', "films (if that term is still applicable) that work against the grain, a new avant-garde as it were. Similar to Giorgio Agamben's notion of the contemporary, but specifically applied to the fine arts, Said's concept of late style is a form that "defies the infirmities of the present, as well as the palliatives of the past, in order to seek out this future, to posit it and perform it even in words and images, gestures and representations, that now seem puzzling, untimely or impossible."4 Late style is for
Said being 'in' while being oddly apart from the present, in other words: lateness is a form of exile in one's own times: contrary to other exiles that live elsewhere, late style artists remain present. As an example he describes a particular moment in Beethoven's
4 Michael Wood, "Introduction", in Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), xv.
208 career when the artist was "in full command of his medium and nevertheless abandoned] communication with the established social order of which he [was] a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. Said describes several 'glimpses of late style' in classical music and literature, but none in cinema. Not only do I think it is already possible to find good examples of late style in the past century of cinema (Chris
Marker would be a good start), but more importantly, it is something to strive for. This could be the ultimate reanimation (and reinvention) of cinema, but that will require a new openness from film artists, and more courage to try things that go against the grain and that, very possibly, will not bring immediate public acclaim: "in the history of art late works are the catastrophes."6
For me Said's idea of lateness is appealing, because it is basically a form of survival in the arts beyond what is acceptable and 'normal'. Moreover, lateness assumes that one cannot go beyond lateness: it is a way to keep up with one's time while already being out of time. And most of all, as becomes clear from Said's examples that include
Glen Gould and Jean Genet, lateness has besides its tragic aspects also many playful aspects. "It is part of the generosity of Said's critical imagination that he sees
'amusement' as a form of resistance. He can do this, because amusement, like pleasure and privacy, does not require reconciliation with a status quo or a dominant regime." It is this freedom that unites all the instances of lateness Said studied, to which I would like to add the example of Marcel Broodthaers.
Edward Said, On Late Style, 8. 6 Ibid., 160. 7 Michael Wood, "Introduction", in Edward Said, On Late Style, xiv.
209 Q: Indeed, can you explain where this interest for Broodthaers' work comes from, besides your Belgian roots?
A: Broodthaers has a central place in my project because he actually was something of a missing link, "mediating between the end of a modernist cinema and the beginning of postmodern visual culture."8 Moreover, Broodthaers was on a mission that bears many similarities to what I have set out to do here:
For Broodthaers, filmmaking represented less an opportunity to indulge his cinephilia through homage (though it was that too) than an attempt to deploy an archaic form of popular culture in the service of a larger aesthetic enterprise. His films are the work of an amateur - the lover - who seeks in the cinema not only a refuge from the gallery's demand for the object (a concern with many in his own generation of artists) but a rich lode of iconography to appropriate for his own art.9
In general, Broodthaers's ideas about art, art galleries and the museum deserve attention here both by way of a conclusion as by way of a new beginning. Key is his constant return to the importance of avoiding working with a mould, which is always represented in his work by the use of mussels (a Belgian national delicacy). In French, a mussel or 'la moule' (female) refers to the sea animal, and 'le moule' (male) to a fixed pattern or a restricting framework of assumptions. By using 'moule' Broodthaers can refer to both at the same time, a play on words that is lost in English.
Two of the 'moulds' Broodthaers was reacting against were the boom of installation art and the constant transformation of art into merchandise. In particular with
Bruce Jenkins, "Postscript: the Impossible Cinema of Marcel Broodthaers." In The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, edited by Graeme Harper and Rob Stone, (London, Wallflower Press, 2007), 165. 9 Ibid., 165.
210 his construction of his Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department, he critiques how everything, art, the museum, even art theory, is levelled:
Every material support, including the site itself - whether art magazine, dealer's fair booth, or museum gallery - will be reduced to a system of pure equivalency by the homogenizing principle of commodification, the operation of pure exchange value from which nothing can escape and for which everything is transparent to the underlining marker value for which it is a sign. This reduction was given manic form by Broodthaers as he affixed "figure" labels to random sets of objects, effecting their equivalence through the tags that assign them as either 'Fig. 1', 'Fig. 2', 'Fig. 0' or 'Fig. 12'.10
In the film section of his museum (Section Cinema) Broodthaers put these labels not only on objects, but also all over the screen, thus making individual shots, even parts of shots and scenes, from the films projected on the screen part of his collection of 'Fig.'s'. This is, in my eyes, a most original, virtual, and interactive alternative to making found- footage films, and to building a film-footage collection. It is a possible model for new ways of making hybrid composite works with film traces and a creative model for thinking about the 'virtual life of film' (Rodowick's term).
Not that I want to compare my work too much to the truly original and inventive oeuvre of Broodthaers, but we also have in common our attraction for the outmoded. His work reaches directly back to the same period that Walter Benjamin studied in his
Arcades project, "nineteenth century bourgeois culture" which "might easily seduce the viewer into dismissing his work as being obviously obsolete and not at all concerned with the presuppositions of contemporary art."11 This is something I anticipate with my work that rouses the kitsch from the 20th century to assembly (to paraphrase Benjamin). But
Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post Medium Condition (New York, Thames and Hudson, 1999), 15. 11 Douglas Crimp, On The Museum's Ruins. (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1993), 216.
211 just as Benjamin's work was retrospective, Broodthaers 'assembly' or re-collection offers us a view on art and culture that could only open up from this site of obsolescence.12 And he did this for film as well. In many of his films, Broodthaers returns to the initial promises and potentialities of early cinema, going completely against the structural film
'grain' of his time:
In so parting company with structuralist film's modernism, Broodthaers was not denying film as a medium. He was, rather, understanding this medium in the light of the openness promised by early film, an openness woven into the very mesh of the image, as the flickering irresolution of the illusion of movement produced the experience of sight itself as dilated: a phenomenological mixture of presence and absence, immediacy and distance. If the medium of primitive film resisted structural closure in this sense, it allowed Broodthaers to see what the structuralists did not: that the filmic apparatus presents us with a medium whose specificity is to be found in its condition as self-differing. It is aggregative, a matter of interlocking supports and layered conventions.
While Broodthaers was working in another era, the 1960s and 1970s, it was also one that was marked by declarations that film was dead, 'killed' by the arrival of the Portapak and the expansion of television. Today, his work is proof that it is exactly at such times when new technology renders older ones outmoded, that we have a chance to grasp the inner complexities of a medium, to look back and see it for real (reel), afresh. This is also what drives my practice as a film artist-scholar working with found-footage.
Q: Why did you opt for working with collages and found-footage as the creative part of this research in the first place?
1 7 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 45. 13 Ibid., 44.
212 A: For three reasons. Firstly because this way of working in/with film is very similar to writing an academic film essay: it involves a lot of research to find sources and information about the found films; you order the found clips as citations to build your argument; and then you edit it all into a coherent text with proper references (footnotes or credits). For this research-creation project, I found this to be the most useful way to make my work with film approach the structure of working with text, and vice-versa, and this helped me to demonstrate that film-making as a form of academic research is as worthy as any other research project. I hope to have broken ground for more openness and acceptance of this idea in academia, but in my eyes what I did is not revolutionary: all research is creative, and all creation involves research. What I did is at best innovative in form. My return to Benjamin is not original either. As Catherine Russell observed, as film studies "becomes increasingly "undisciplined" and unfocussed, Benjamin, whose work is equally decentred, seems to becoming more and more relevant. ... Several key
Benjaminian concepts, including the collector and the quotation, have direct bearing on the actual practice of film criticism and the new technologies that enable critics to own films (in superlative DVD formats) and quote from them in the form of frame-grabs and digital clips (copyright issues not withstanding)."14 I definitely like this more imaginative way of writing about film, because these methods are so close to the various forms of collage in film. And despite not being very original, I was happy to let myself be guided by Benjamin's Arcades Project, and his cultural critiques.
14 Catherine Russell, "Dialectical Film Criticism: Walter Benjamin's Historiography, Cultural Critique and the Archive" in Transformations 15, (November 2007), 1. http://transformationsjournal.org/iournal/issue 15/article_08.shtml (accessed August, 8th, 2008).
213 The second reason why I chose this method is that found-footage films are always infused with social and political reflections: that is crucial to me. At the core of the project lies the idea of creating a memory of resistance, itself a concept with a double meaning. It is a memory of resistance in the sense that I try to resist the current dominant thinking about the status of film. This is a dominant discourse inspired by a market logic that always promotes the latest technology as better and essential. This market logic is itself swept up by the current acceleration of introducing new technological innovations: the quicker the turn-around of all this new technology, the quicker it needs to get on and off the market. But it is also a memory of resistance by remembering (and honouring) earlier voices of dissent, other thinkers and artists who resisted the (late-) capitalist logic and its homogenizing effects: the off-stream let us say, as opposed to the mainstream.
The third reason to make found-footage films and not shoot my own images
(something I missed at times) is really because of the content of this project: an examination of what is happening to the medium film at a time when fast technological changes make its cultural position shift to more of a historical referent. In that sense, this was a bit of a natural science project: like studying a species threatened with extinction or undergoing multiple mutations; tracing its lineage and family history to be able to understand the nature of these mutations and signs of extinction. But my project ultimately seemed to evolve into the form of an alternative history project, a rewriting of history. This was in major part a reaction to the lack of historicity that I encountered, especially in the experimental film scene where one would expect to find the most fervent cinephiles. My project is therefore not merely about countering the distortions created by the dominance of mainstream cinema (which to a large extent follows a market logic),
214 but is as much as an attempt to create more open-mindedness, tolerance and historical consciousness within art-film circles. I wanted to pay homage to forgotten films, forgotten genres, forgotten formats, forgotten processes, those overlooked by the advocates of both high and low culture. The more I traced the past lives of film as a small medium, the more I actually felt that I was doing exactly what Benjamin described: rousing the kitsch of the previous century into assemblies. I found myself saving orphans and cherishing my foundlings.
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224 SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Ahwesh, Peggy. The Color of Love. (1994), 10 mins.
Antonioni, Michelangelo ,The Passenger (Professione: Reporter), 1975, 126 mins.
Broodthaers, Marcel. La Pluie: projet pour un texte. (1969), 3 mins.
. Un Jardin d'hiver. (1974), 7 mins.
Crazy Cinematographe. (2007). DVD Compilation. (Film and Kunst DmbH, Luxemburg), 165 mins.
Conner, Bruce. A Movie, (1958), 12 mins.
Delpeut, Peter. Diva Dolorosa. (1999), 75 mins.
.The Forbidden Quest. (1993), 70 mins.
Lyrical Nitrate. (1991), 50 mins.
Deutsch, Gustav. Film 1st: 1-6, (1998), 60 mins.
. Film 1st 7-12. (2002), 90 mins.
Forgacs, Peter. Private Hungary 1-15. A series of films made from 1988 - 2009. For individual titles see: http://forgacspeter.hu/english/films
Godard, Jean-Luc. Le Mepris. (1963), 103 mins.
. Week End. (1967), 105 mins.
Kubrick, Stanley. 2001: A Space Odyssey. (1968), 141 mins.
Landmarks of Early Film. (1994). DVD Compilation, (Film Preservation Associates, U.S.A), 117 mins.
Lipsett, Arthur. Very Nice, Very Nice. (1964), 6 min, 59s.
. Trip down Memory Lane. (1965), 12 min 40 s.
Marker, Chris. LaJetee. (1962), 28 mins.
. Sans Soleil. (1982), 100 mins.
Morrison, Bill. Decasia. (2002), 67 mins.
. Light is Calling (2004), 8 mins.
. The Mesmerist (2003), 16 mins.
Origins of Film. (1993). DVD Compilation, (Library of Congress, U.S. A), 564 mins.
Saved from the Flames: Fifty-Four Rare and Restored Films. (2008), DVD Compilation. (Film Preservation Associates, U.S.A), 420 mins.
Shub, Esfir. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. (1927), 87 mins.
225 Varda, Agnes. Les Plages a"Agnes. (2008), 110 mins.
Vertov, Dziga. Man with a Movie Camera. (1929), 68 mins.
226 ANNEXES
227 „'*'•* - ft
Fig.l. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1974): 16mm Slug Film
228 Fig2. Double Identity (Gerda Johanna Canmiaer, 2009): Film Stll
229 Fig.3. Hot Shots! Part Deux (Jim Abrahams, 1993): 16mm Slug Film 1 '^ II
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Fig.4. Hot Shots! Part Deux (Jim Abrahams, 1993): 16mm Slug Film
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232 Fig.6. Unidentified Film: 16mm Slug Film ;*a%i het huidi Ki^!*' I'1i j den aamd "alt ber~ de ontdekking
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Flg.7. Double Dutch (Garcia Johanna Caminaer, 2007): Film Still Fig.8. You've Got Mail? (Nora Ephron, 1998): 16mm Slug Film
235 Fig.9. Double Talk (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film St talis
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Fig. 10. Unidentified Film: 16mm Slug Fi
237 Fig.ll. Unidentified Film: 16mm Slug Film
238 Fig. 12. Unidentified Film: 16nim Slug Film Fig. 13. Double Jump (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still Fig. 14. Stargate (Gerfa Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Digital Photo of IMA Film Lab Fig. 15. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Digital Photo of IMA Film Lab Fig. 16. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Digital Photo of IMA Film Lab Fig. 17. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still
244 Fig. 18. Stargate (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still
245 l-:-&?:WS
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Fig. 19. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Stil Fig.20. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Stil
247 Fig.21. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still
248 ;*^3Sgi»$i&te£^&Jfc£&5
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^^^^pT^rrtC •i «- „ , Fig.22. Stardust (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Stil 249 Fig.23. Unidentified Damaged Film: 16mm Film Scan 250 Fig.24. Unidentified Damaged Film: 16mm Film Scan Fig.25. Unidentified Damaged Film: 16mm Film Scan 252 Fig.26. B-Film Keeper (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still 253 Fig.27. B-Filrn Keeper (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still !54 Fig.28. B-Film Keeper (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still •WW'^ff^ :M* \- V,^ 1i*i*r ^„- 1..#^;-*y%«! Fig.29. #e//as of the South Seas (Castle Films, 1944): 16mm Film Scan 256 ;'#*. "^"^0». - #>*••• • '-^^aftsisjy* Fig.30. Belles of the South Seas (Castle Films, 1944): 16mm Film Scan :.%" ll&tila "If -- "# Fig.31.5e/Ze5 of the South Seas (Castle Films, 1944): 16mm Film Scan 258 Fig.32. Skindrums and Tattoos (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still ^ « * * ?**'&>:,'iJt;*A:c~.^«#^#''^ Fig.33.7P53 (Gerda Johanna Camnriaer, 2009): Film Still Fig.34.1953 (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still Fig35.1953 (Gerda Johanna Cammaer, 2009): Film Still. :V^J >1: ¥ fc'1^ Fig. 36. i?522yl (Eric Rondeplerre, 1995) 263 Fig.37. Rene Magritte, La Femme cachee (1929) 264 Fig.38. Je ne voispas la (femme) cachee dans laforet, in La Revolution Surrealiste, Paris, no. 12, December 15th, 1929 ^eterOelpo; lineD \V. !=* X3 Fig.40. Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2004): Film Still 267 Fig.41. The Color of Love (Peggy Ahwesh, 1994): Film Still 268 « SIfeeR «sc <*fc*&?. I 1%' ^S^*A«I *-«fil V.«* »m--^ - **&: N't ^ ?5f •« _», ;.**•»? Fig.42. F/7/« Zy; Material (Gustav Deutsch, 1998): Film Still 269 V «;KOfu./> SWJOH. m [/INVENTION Pi \ -1' M A MS!*' ilpiari* • *^ Fig.43. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department, Film Section (1971-1972) 270 Fig.44. Lapluie (Marcel Broodthaers, 1969): 16mm Film Stips 271 Fig.45. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department, Film Section (1971-1972): Fig.-Signs on Film Screens 272 IJEPARTEMEHT ,,.,„„„,„, DAVID • INGRES • WfERTZ * COURBET * £SC.B fl2 12U3 54 02 12 03 54 Fig.46. Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department Fig.47. Unidentified Damaged Film, Institute) National de Cinema, Maputo, Mozambique 274 NTEST "• Ni^ •* i*h ^g^tt»»ffi———*»KB«B™ f ?/• ^ *4*£#^"j* Fig.48. Film Dump, Instituto Nacional de Cinema, Maputo, Mozambique, 1999 275 Fig.49. This handbag is made from postconsumer Bollywood movies of India that are no longer ran in theatres. Film strips are crocheted together by a women's cooperative (that didn't have work before) into a textile and hand fashioned into a purse. The film is the most durable "newer" 35mm film used in the industry because it must be able to take the multiple reuse as it runs through the projectors in the theatres. Hold the bag up to the light and see the images of the film. Bag measures 7" x 7" x 3". Sides are hand crocheted yarn work. The perfect gift for the film professional or student and a film enthusiast. (Text from Ebay). 276 Fig.50. The End. 277