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Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion*

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Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion* Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion* JONATHAN WALLEY The radical transformations that took place in the arts after the Second World War reached a crescendo in the 1960s. The nature and possibilities of each art form were fundamentally rethought, while the idea that these art forms could be clearly distinguished from one another gave way to intensive experimentation with cross-fertilization and mixing. Recall Allan Kaprow’s statement, “The young artist of today need no longer say ‘I am a painter,’ or ‘I am a dancer.’ He is simply an ‘artist.’” 1 Or this definition by Joseph Kosuth: Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art . That’s because the word “art” is general and the word “painting” is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. 2 In the visual and performing arts, this period is described using terms like “expanded arts,” “dematerialization,” “intermedia,” and, more recently, the “post- medium condition.” 3 The parallel term in film is “expanded cinema.” Put simply, it refers to cinema expanding beyond the bounds of traditional uses of celluloid film, the medium that had defined it for over six decades, to inhabit a wide range of other materials and forms. 4 * This essay is dedicated to the memory of Adolfas Mekas. 1. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57 (October 1958), p. 57. 2. Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990 , ed. Gabriele Cuercio (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 18. “Art After Philosophy” originally appeared in Studio International (October 1969), and Kosuth first made this statement in Arthur R. Rose, “Four Interviews,” Arts Magazine 43 (February 1969), p. 23. 3. The term is Rosalind Krauss’s. See “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition,” October 116 (Spring 2006), pp. 55–62, and A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 4. I will use “celluloid film” to refer to all the physical components of the film medium taken together, as traditionally employed by filmmakers: camera, lenses, photochemical filmstrip, projector, and screen. I will use “standard uses” and “traditional practices” to refer to conventional filmmaking, as opposed to expanded-cinema practices in which the physical components of the film medium are multiplied, rearranged, replaced with other materials, abandoned, and/or used outside of the typical theatrical screening context. OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 23–50. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00056 by guest on 30 September 2021 24 OCTOBER As originally described by critics like Gene Youngblood and Sheldan Renan, expanded cinema included video and television, light shows, computer art, multi - media installation and performance, kinetic sculpture and theater, and holography, to name a few forms. It encompassed everything from mass-market theatrical films (Youngblood discusses Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey ) to experimental film (e.g., Michael Snow’s Wavelength and the films of Andy Warhol) to “kinesthetic” happenings and performances that employed no moving-image media whatsoever. As Youngblood had it, “When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness . Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.” 5 The expansion of cinema was often characterized as liberating filmmakers from tradition and convention. As Renan wrote in 1967, expanded cinema rejected the idea “that motion pictures should be made to universal specifications on given machines under given and never changing conditions.” 6 Cinema was now “liberated from the concept of standardization.” 7 Like Youngblood, Renan con - ceived of “cinema” in the broadest possible terms. Any material that could be used to control or manipulate light and time—metal, magnetic tape, plastic, glass, the human body—could be a cinematic material. But if this liberation of cinema from the confines of the standard uses of cel - luloid film opened a door onto an exciting world of possibilities, it also raised concerns among filmmakers about the very identity of their art form. And it was specifically within experimental film that this expansion reverberated most force - fully, given that world’s proximity to (which is not to say its inclusion in) the art world. While many filmmakers and sympathetic critics felt some of the same skep - ticism toward traditional practices with media that animated the expanded arts in general, they must also have had reservations about the implications of cinema’s expansion. A belief in and commitment to the specificity of film had been key to the assertion of cinema’s autonomy within the pantheon of the arts and, as impor - tant, to experimental cinema’s articulation of its identity as an artistic tradition. To cast off the film medium was to risk losing a connection to a tradition with which contemporaneous experimental filmmakers identified as artists and earlier generations had labored to build and nurture. That the exploration of new intermedia forms in the name of expanded cin - ema dovetailed with the sudden surge of interest in the moving image in the art world only complicated matters. As cinema expanded in the direction of other arts, these other arts reached toward cinema for a way to extend their major aes - thetic interests, much as they had done in the 1920s. Together, the twin phenomena of expanded cinema and the proliferation of moving images in the 5. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), p. 41. 6. Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1967), p. 227. 7. Ibid., p. 227. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00056 by guest on 30 September 2021 Identity Crisis 25 museum and gallery introduced cinema to new spaces and forms, and brought to bear upon it new discourses: expanded cinema’s language of new media, interme - dia, and synesthesia, on the one hand, and the art world’s post-Minimalist theorizing, on the other hand, wherein cinema became “sculptural,” “performa - tive,” “conceptual,” and, in a more contemporary theoretical formulation, “post-medium.” An early expression of concern over these developments was Annette Michelson’s critically important essay “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” first pub - lished in Film Culture in 1966. According to Michelson, the erasure of boundaries between the arts and the ethic of intermedia at the heart of expanded cinema threatened to derail radical filmmaking’s quest for autonomy and drain cinema of its potential power: The questioning of the values of formal autonomy has led to an attempted dissolution of distinctions or barriers between media . Cinema, on the verge of winning the battle for the recognition of its specificity—and every major filmmaker and critic in the last half- century has fought that battle—is now engaged in a reconsideration of its aims. The Victor now questions his Victory. The emergence of new “intermedia,” the revival of the old dream of synesthesia, the cross-fertilization of dance, theater, and film . constitute a syn - drome of that radicalism’s crisis, both formal and social. 8 In this essay, Michelson chastised certain experimental filmmakers for uncriti - cally parroting the rhetoric of other art forms (for example, Brakhage’s association of his films with Abstract Expressionism, or “action painting”). Michelson acknowl - edged the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of film drawing upon the other arts. But for artistic cross-fertilization to bear fruit, each of the interacting art forms needed to be secure in its “respective ontologies.” 9 As the youngest art form, cin - ema—its sense of ontological identity still maturing—was the most susceptible to losing its independence by borrowing the forms and ideas of the other arts. Though Michelson did not make the point explicitly, one implication of her essay was that experimental cinema was especially at risk of losing its identity and independence in the context of cinema’s expansion. It may indeed have been that “every major filmmaker and critic in the last half-century” had contributed to cin - ema’s struggle for autonomy, but experimental film lacked the high-cultural profile and well-established economic and institutional infrastructures of more mainstream cinematic modes such as Hollywood cinema and the international art film—not to mention the other arts. Moreover, experimental film was historically, aesthetically, and institutionally interconnected with the other arts in ways that 8. Annette Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” in The Film Culture Reader , ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 420. 9. Ibid., p. 420. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00056 by guest on 30 September 2021 26 OCTOBER Hollywood and the art cinema weren’t, making it more difficult to define against the backdrop of the media-focused expanded and inter-arts practices of the period. Michelson’s essay, therefore, was an important intervention in that it saw the question of cinema’s identity not solely in aesthetic terms but in institutional (i.e., economic) ones as well. As we shall see, her concerns were felt by filmmakers at the time, and remain relevant today. Expanded cinema and the embrace of the moving image by the art world thus threatened two intertwined endeavors undertaken by filmmakers and critics for decades: the definition of their art form and the establishment of its autonomy— and therefore its worth—among the other arts.
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