The Death of Structural Film Notes Toward a Filmless Cinema

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Death of Structural Film Notes Toward a Filmless Cinema Luis Recoder The Death of Structural Film Notes Toward a Filmless Cinema 1. The destruction of the celluloid material of film do we mean by celluloid film? What bit of the signals the ‘death of cinema’. If such is the case, film material are we referring to? What is this “in it is from the perspective – the optic if you wish itself ” we are attempting to get a hold of in order – of the celluloid material itself that the question to better “materialize” our object and perhaps aid of death in cinema gets developed. The ‘death of in the current procession of casting it out of its cinema’ is the death of film - not the absolute and existence as a dominant cinematic art form of our final death of cinema but the death of cinema as a time? The perforated ribbon, celluloid acetate base, cinema based on the material make-up of cellulose or the granular structure of exposed silver halides acetate film. For cinema is alive and well. Film, on suspended in the upper regions of a gelatinous the other hand is on its way out. emulsion? For surely it is the entire length, breadth, density and overall objecthood of the object that is meant by the use of the word “film.” And yet it is 2. the photo-graphic granularity of the medium that The destruction of celluloid occurs at the very still seems to dominate our definition of film. beginning, during the birth of cinema to be precise: the precarious passage of flammable cellulose nitrate and the burning carbon arc lamp of early 4. projection. Death is the filmic burning down of the rudimentary movie houses of the early 20th The destruction of celluloid – like the destruction of century. Does cellulose nitrate signal death or is it most art forms – is an act of avant-garde vandalism. the carbon arc lamp? Film or projection? Which It is a Dadaist impulse, as in the destruction of the is it? Or do they work in tandem, the slower the screen in Rene Claire’s Entr’acte (1924) – a tearing frame rate the better chance this mechanico- through the illusionist plane of the cinematic chemical ensemble have in burning down the canvas, the illuminated screen. The destructive house? impulse of the avant-garde is immanent: the death of an emerging art form is played out, performed, executed, as in time-lapse cinematography so as 3. to speed up the process of growth and to further The destruction of celluloid as the spectacle par partake in the decay and ruin. So what comes after excellence of the death of cinema. But what exactly death? 26 Deaths of Cinema, Special Graduate Conference Issue Spectator 27: Supplement (2007): 26-30. RECODER 5. In Owen Land’s Bardo Follies (1967), a 16mm effacing the exposed layer of emulsion, the work of film loop is burnt in the projector. The loop is of burning-through works at removing or withdrawing a beauty pageant waving repeatedly toward the from the medium the non- or extra-filmic fragment, spectator. The footage is burnt over and over to in this case the photo-graphic substance. Preserved show various stages of thermal decomposition. is the purity of the celluloid, the essence of film The image of the woman blisters into bubbly – in this case the smoldering acetate churning in a shapes and warm liquid colors so that she is no real-time boil. But Land’s film goes even further longer in the picture. The melting of the footage and burns a hole right through the acetate itself in the gate consumes the photographic image in to reveal the white of the screen. This burning- real-time (the real-time of the burning at the gate). through to the other side of the film plane will be The resolution of the photographic image is utterly repeated nearly a decade later by Paul Sharits in dissolved and becomes soluble by the intense heat his Analytical Studies II: Unframed Lines (1971- of the projector lamp which melts the film. The 76). As if taking his earlier signature color flicker granular structure of the original footage is cooked films and effacing the structural integrity of their out of existence, boiled-over to give rise to the meticulously framed frame-by-frame registration, plasticity of the acetate plastic, the cellulose base Sharits scratches and tears the film strip vertically, itself. thereby cutting through the latticework of frames and framelines, and ending – as in Land’s film – in the burning-through the film plane toward the 6. white of the screen. The destruction of celluloid in Bardo Follies is a return to the material base, the material support 8. of the medium. It begins with the introduction, or “establishing shot” if you will, of photo-based So ‘What is film?’ if the film celluloid has been cinema and “re-photographs” it not with a camera effaced, negated, and violently cancelled out proper but with the burning exposure of a 16mm in these early materialist works? Not film and projector. Film and projection work in tandem thus yet film? Unless these burnt-frame films are retreading the precarious passage of silver nitrate performed live before an audience, one cannot through the burning rays of carbon arc lamp light. truly overcome film’s photo-graphic hegemony. Not retreading but rethreading through an earlier For Land and Sharits’ destructive efforts are in passage in cinema’s technical history. What is the end recuperated in the form of photo-graphic initially perceived as dangerously destructive in the reproductions, i.e., film prints. More precisely, interface between cellulose nitrate and carbon arc they capture live projector-performances: the strip is in Land’s film provocatively and even seductively of film is held at the gate, without intermittency; destructive. Beauty pageant melts in the thermal persistence-of-vision is curtailed, the illusion of agitation of chemical compounds suspending the movement deferred, and in its place is the real mass of exposed silver halides. Is she waving hello movement of a film still – a film frame – melting or good-bye to cinema as we know it? in real-time before the burning rays of lamp light. But all this is re-photographed by the camera, re- staged for its reproduction on light-sensitive film. 7. And for this to be really real one would have to take Destruction of the celluloid in Bardo Follies is the it a step further, that is to take these burnt-frame destruction not of the total film object itself but of films and put them through a kind of ‘second- that layer of the material where the micro-density degree burn’ wherein the final product would in of the granular structure is embedded. In the turn be destroyed during their projection before an reductivist logic of formalist strategies we could audience. That way we can truly see the empirically venture to say that by means of obliterating or unmediated effects of a burning-through to the DEATHS OF CINEMA 27 THE death OF structural FILM Light Spill (2006), by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. Photos by Roel Meelkop (TENT, Rotterdam) other side of the film plane. “Unmediated,” that is pure transparent illumination of a screen plane. by the un-filmic photo-graphic . The evacuation of celluloid unveils the truth of cinema. 9. Hollis Frampton’s conceptual ‘non-film’, though 10. not ‘anti-film’ A Lecture (1968) is such a burning- The question of the ‘death of cinema’ can be through. Not a burning of frames so as to peel-back retrieved from the so-called structural film. The the layers and methodically expose the question destruction of celluloid is a way to expedite getting ‘What is film?’ but a letting-through of projected at or near the essentialist question: ‘What is light in the absence of celluloid. In this lecture, a film?’ The “essentialist project” – developed by the pre-recorded voice-over directs the projectionist to theoretical efforts of the original Anthology Film turn the projector on and insert a number of objects, Archives group (Sitney, Mekas, Kubelka, et al.) including a red filter and pipe cleaner. Frampton’s – is primarily a matter of locating and securing a lecturer points out that inserting nothing in the formalist approach to cinema. Land’s early films projector but the white light of the projection lamp are characterized as “structural” in that strategies is, in essence, a film. In fact this light, which fits, as such as loop printing, repetition, duration, and he says “conveniently” in the projector, is in truth granularity, are addressed for the sole purpose of “more” than if actual celluloid were to be used. If making us aware of the material conditions of one wants to see “more,” which is in fact “less,” one cinema. Hence the loop structure of the opening must subtract from the light. This is achieved by sequence of Bardo Follies – or for that matter inserting a red filter, thus subtracting green and the entirety of Film in Which There Appear Edge blue from the white light. In the burning-through Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965- of celluloid that is manifested in Land and Sharits’ 66) – is considered “structural” in its foregrounding films, not less but more is revealed, since the blank of the material-as-material, film-as-film, and so vacancy which remains in the melting away of on and so forth. Structural film’s answer to the the celluloid points beyond the filtration of light question ‘What is film?” is to show the film itself rays via a semi-opaque film plane and toward the in its purest form, not as an end in itself but as an 28 SPECIAL ISSUE RECODER attempt to arrive at a new beginning unhindered death of film is necessary in Land’s Bardo Follies by unquestioned notions of “What film is.” In this in order to make us aware of the materiality of light, Land’s ritualistic melting of the celluloid the medium.
Recommended publications
  • Visual Experimentation. Art, Aesthetics and Ethnography in (Un)Guided Tour, a Video by Irina Botea, Marco De Luca and Stefan Voicu
    vol. 2, n. 2, December 2013, pp. 76-88 |DOI: 10.12835/ve2013.2-0025 | www.vejournal.org | ISSN 2281-1605 ________________________________________________________________________ Stefan Voicu Anthropologist Visual Experimentation. Art, Aesthetics and Ethnography in (Un)guided Tour, a video by Irina Botea, Marco De Luca and Stefan Voicu Watch the video here: http://youtu.be/PEnXKfoyT_A Abstract The following paper deals with the production of a short ethnographic video on the Royal Museum of Central Africa from Tervuren, Belgium. The scope is to deploy the organization of the ethnographic team that participated in the articulation of the project, unravel the context in which the project emerged and unfolded, as well as engaging with the elaboration of the audio-visual approach taken within the ethnographic research. Focusing particularly on the latter aspect, this paper will portray the relation between art and ethnography as being characterized by experimentations with aesthetics. Taking a look back at certain artistic movements that explored the limits and possibilities of film aesthetics, the entries will pinpoint the relevance of lettrist cinema, institutional critique and structural film to the construction of an ethnographic video on the museum practices of the RMCA. Keywords Aesthetics, Art, Ethnography, Museum Stefan Voicu Stefan Voicu recently graduated a Msc in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Catholic University of Leuven. He is interested in assemblages of art, labor and critique. Currently he is working independently on the possibilities of post-textual ethnographies to weave the practices of art and anthropology. Email: [email protected] 76 De-centering, De-marginalizing and (Re-)Tracing. Visual anthropology has had a marginal position within the discipline.
    [Show full text]
  • The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film*
    The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film* JONATHAN WALLEY I In 1976, the American Federation of Arts organized a major program of American avant-garde films made since the early 1940s. In his introduction to the program’s catalog, Whitney film curator and series organizer John Hanhardt argued that the central preoccupation of filmmakers across the history of avant-garde cinema had been with the exploration of the material properties of the film medium itself: “This cinema subverts cinematic convention by exploring its medium and its properties and materials, and in the process creates its own history separate from that of the classical narrative cinema. It is filmmaking that creates itself out of its own experience.”1 Having traced the history of avant-garde film according to the modernist notion that an art form advances by reflexively scrutinizing the “properties and materials” of its medium, Hanhardt turned his attention to more recent developments. But these new developments were not entirely receptive to his modernist model. On the one hand, he argued, filmmakers were continuing to create works that engaged the physical materials of film—film strip, projector, camera, and screen—and the range of effects these made possible. On the other, this engagement appeared to be leading some filmmakers to create cinematic works challenging the material limits of the film medium as it had been defined for over eighty years. For example, in Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973), the focus of the viewer’s attention was not an image projected onto a screen, but the projector beam itself, which over the course of thirty minutes grew from a thin line of light to a cone—a three-dimensional light sculpture with which the viewer could interact.
    [Show full text]
  • Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960S and ’70S
    Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960s and ’70s JUAN CARLOS KASE for David E. James I think it would be most dangerous to regard “this new art” in a purely structural way. In my case, at least, the work is not, for example, a proof of an experiment with “structure” but “just occurs,” springs directly from my life patterns which unpre- dictably force me into . oh well . —Paul Sharits, letter to P. Adams Sitney1 In the dominant critical assessments of Anglo-American film history, scholars have agreed that much of the avant-garde cinema of the late 1960s and early ’70s exhibited a collective shift toward increased formalism. From P. Adams Sitney’s initial canonization of “Structural Film” in 19692 to Malcolm Le Grice’s “New Formal Tendency” (1972)3 and Annette Michelson’s “new cinematic discourse” of “epistemological concern” (1972)4 to Peter Gidal’s “Structuralist/Materialist Film” (1975)5—as well as in recent reconceptualizations and reaffirmations of this schol- arship by Paul Arthur (1978, 1979, and 2004), David James (1989), and A. L. Rees 1. Collection of Anthology Film Archives. Letter is dated “1969??.” Roughly fifteen years later, Sharits reiterated his frustration with the critical interpretations of his work in a more public context, albeit in slightly different terms: “There was a problem in the ’60s and even in the ’70s of intimidating artists into avoiding emotional motivations for their work, the dominant criticism then pursued everything in terms of impersonal, formal, structural analysis.” Jean- Claude Lebensztejen, “Interview with Paul Sharits” (June 1983), in Paul Sharits, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • Self-Reflection in Modernism, Post-Modernism and Abbas Kiarostami and Jean Luc Godard's Cinema
    Sport and Art 1(1): 24-30, 2013 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/saj.2013.010104 Self-reflection in Modernism, Post-Modernism and Abbas Kiarostami and Jean Luc Godard's Cinema Asghar fahimifar*, Asadollah Gholamali University of Tarbiat Mudares, Tehran, Iran *Corresponding Author: [email protected] Copyright © 2013 Horizon Research Publishing All rights reserved Abstract This paper, has presented film-making to a series of principles. In fact, we can say that frameworks relying mostly on modern and post-modern post-modernism definition is paradoxical, since it is in direct movies and the essential expression of self-reflection. The contrast to every definite term or definition (Lyotard, 1984, p. post-modern movies are in some respects different from the 88). Post-modernism destroys every concept which has modern and classic ones. However, they still benefit from transformed to an idol. It means that all the stabilized past achievements. The element of self-reflection is obvious structures of art are constant in societies. The suffix of "Post" in Godard's works which connotes the reality of their filming. raises many questions. One is that if this suffix means "after In especially most of his latest works, Abbas Kiarostami also something", will it also connote the school after modernism. takes benefit from this technique. The present article One of the post-modernism interests is the question of the analyses these two directors' viewpoints and presents the most important human beliefs. In fact, it raises problems and obtained influences on classic, modern, and post-modern challenges the definite, like the concept of theatre, cinema, movies.
    [Show full text]
  • Postclassical Hollywood/Postmodern Subjectivity Representation In
    Postclassical Hollywood/Postmodern Subjectivity Representation in Some ‘Indie/Alternative’ Indiewood Films Jessica Murrell Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Discipline of English Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Adelaide August 2010 Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................. iii Declaration ............................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgements.................................................................................................. v Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Critical Concepts/Critical Contexts: Postmodernism, Hollywood, Indiewood, Subjectivity ........................................................................................12 Defining the Postmodern.....................................................................................13 Postmodernism, Cinema, Hollywood. .................................................................22 Defining Indiewood. ...........................................................................................44 Subjectivity and the Classical Hollywood Cinema...............................................52 Chapter 2. Depthlessness in American Psycho and Being John Malkovich.........61 Depthlessness, Hermeneutics, Subjectivity..........................................................63
    [Show full text]
  • Exhibiting Structural Film? Annette Michelson, Between Criticism And
    228 – 229 Exhibiting Structural Film? In his critical account of New Forms Annette Michelson, Between in Film, an exhibition devoted to Criticism and Curating the most current research of Adeena Mey American independent cinema, and organized by Annette Michelson in 1974 in Montreux, Switzerland, Dominique Noguez, one of France’s foremost theoreti- cians and promoters of experimen- tal film, criticized the retrospective for being too structured.1 For Noguez, if New Forms in Film acted both as an assessment and a mani- festo of New American Cinema, offering one of the first “readings” of “American filmic modernity,” the plurality of works that could be included under the umbrella term of New American Cinema2 was cut off from everything produced on the West Coast—a production distinguished, according to him, by more exuberance and irrationality than its New York counterpart—to favor films characterized by rigor and austerity. Yet, as partial as it might have been, Noguez never- Cover of New Forms in Film, exhibition catalogue, Montreux 1974 theless acknowledged Michelson’s exhibiting stRuctuRal Film? annette michelson, between ­Criticism and cuRating 230 – 231 selection for being coherent and intelligent, a choice able to Impact, also in Lausanne. Berger had early on championed show the newest and most remarkable directions of what video art through his theoretical writings, and the integra- henceforth could appear, as he wrote, as a “New New tion of the medium into exhibition spaces in Switzerland.4 American Cinema.”3 Financial support was provided by the local tourist board, Widely known as an early editor of Artforum before which also loaned its newly built Convention Centre for the going on to found the journal October together with Rosalind event.
    [Show full text]
  • 2011 Wintersession Schedule of Courses
    Rhode Island School of Design Telephone: 401 454 6151 Wintersession 2011 Rhode Island School of Design Office of the Registrar Fax: 401 454 6724 2 College Street [email protected] Schedule of Courses Providence, RI http://intranet.risd.edu 02903-2784 USA www.risd.edu Classes begin January 3 Add/Drop Period January 3-10 WINTERSESSION 2011 COURSE CATALOG TABLE OF CONTENTS Information and Registration Instructions page ................ 2 Wintersession Academic Calendar page ................ 5 Class Meeting Time Key and Building Codes page ................ 5 Course Offerings - General page ................ 7 Liberal Arts Courses page ............... 29 Off-Campus Courses page ............... 38 Registration Form (use only if you do not web register) ............... Back Cover Detach, Complete & File at Registration ABOUT THIS CATALOG--PLEASE READ This Catalog went to press on or about October 1 and Please retain this Catalog. Replacement hard contains all course offerings approved by the copies will be available only through the RISD Store Wintersession Committee through that date. Additional at a nominal cost. An electronic pdf version can be courses may be approved. If they are, they will be listed found via WebAdvisor at http://wa.risd.edu. on WebAdvisor. Also, courses withdrawn or changed after October 1 will be changed on WebAdvisor when RISD reserves the right at any time and without you “Search for Classes”. notice to delete, adjust, or replace any course(s) published in this Catalog. Wintersession 2011 Introduction 2 WINTERSESSION 2011 INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION INSTRUCTIONS PURPOSE start of Wintersession. In addition, some courses require the The central purpose of the Wintersession program is to enrich purchase of materials.
    [Show full text]
  • THEORY and DEFINITION of STRUCTURAL/ MATERIALIST FILM Part One of Peter Gidal's Introductory Essay to the Structural Film Anthology, Published by the Bfi in 1976
    THEORY AND DEFINITION OF STRUCTURAL/ MATERIALIST FILM Part one of Peter Gidal's introductory essay to the Structural Film Anthology, Published by the BFi in 1976. Structural/ Materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist. The process of the film's making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process. But by 'deals with' I do not mean 'represents'. In other words, such films do not document various film procedures, which would place them in the same category as films which transparently document a narrative, a set of actions, etc. Documentation, through usage of the film medium as transparent, invisible, is exactly the same when the object being documented is some 'real event', some film procedure', some 'story', etc. An avant- garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that 'image' is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary. In Structural/ Materialist film, the in/film (not in/frame) and film/viewer material relations, and the relations of the film's structure, are primary to any representational content. The structuring aspects and the attempt to decipher the structure and anticipate/ recorrect it, to clarify and analyse the production-process of the specific image at any specific moment, are the root concern of Structural/ Materialist film.
    [Show full text]
  • An Action History of British Underground Cinema
    University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk 04 University of Plymouth Research Theses 01 Research Theses Main Collection 2003 Not Art: An Action History of British Underground Cinema Reekie, Duncan http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/1273 University of Plymouth All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. NOT ART: AN ACTION HISTORY OF BRITISH UNDERGROUND CINEMA by DuRan Reekie A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth in partial fulfilment for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Falmouth College of Arts August 2003 THESIS CONTAINS CD This copy of the thesis has been supplied on the condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis and no injormntion derived from it mny be published without the author's prior consent. Abstract NOT ART: AN ACTION IDSTORY OF BRITISH UNDERGROUND CINEMA My thesis is both an oppositional history and a (re)definition of British Underground Cinema culture (1959 - 2(02). The historical significance of Underground Cinema has long been ideologically entangled in a mesh of academic typologies and ultra leftist rhetoric, abducting it from those directly involved. The intention of my work is to return definition to the 'object' of study, to write from within.
    [Show full text]
  • The American Film Institute and Philanthropic Support For
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repository@Napier “IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE COUNTRY”: THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE AND PHILANTHROPIC SUPPORT FOR AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL AND INDEPENDENT CINEMA IN THE 1960s. BY R CI R RE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF DOCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY AT EDINBURGH NAPIER UNIVERSITY APRIL 2013 ii Contents Tables ........................................................................................................................ vi Figures ....................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. vii Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... viii Abstract ..................................................................................................................... ix INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 Defining Experimental and Independent Cinema ....................................................... 2 Personal Films and the Medium-Specific Evolution of Avant-Garde Cinema ........... 6 Philanthropic Support and Avant-Garde Arts ........................................................... 12 Experimental Cinema in Academic Institutions ......................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Il Cinema E Le Altre Arti 11 CINERGIE Il Cinema E Le Altre Arti 11
    CINERGIE il cinema e le altre arti 11 CINERGIE il cinema e le altre arti 11 INDICE pag. 04 ABSTRACT pag. 09 Editoriale di Roy Menarini SPECIALE pag. 10 Introduzione di Luca Malavasi pag. 13 Ex-cinema: “Ci devono essere delle macerie specifi che per costruire la città dell’impossibile”. Note su Eureka di Ernie Gehr di Rinaldo Censi pag. 19 Montare cacca: Intorno al fenomeno “YouTube Poop” di Alberto Brodesco pag. 30 La nuova Digital Guerrilla Television: per una post-produzione militante e d’autore di Elena Marcheschi pag. 39 Ripetizione e ri-produzione nelle GIF animate di Tommaso Isabella pag. 45 L’internet-meme nella galassia della postproduzione contemporanea di Sara Tongiani pag. 57 Truccare la storia: la colorizzazione digitale delle foto d’archivio del Colorized History Movement di Elena Gipponi pag. 66 Immagini fl uttuanti: operazioni estetiche e itinerari nell’immateriale visivo digitale di Serena Dafne Magnani pag. 75 “Accidental” Postproduction and Acts of Remembering in Stand By For Tape Back-up, by Ross Sutherland di Chiara Grizzaffi pag. 82 Immagine eri, immagine tornerai: pratiche di appropriazione e postproduzione nella cosplay photography di Giacomo Calorio pag. 92 Un atto iconico di rappresentanza: i video-testamenti degli shahid qaidisti di Lorenzo Donghi SOTTO ANALISI pag. 98 Super Size Stories. Narrative Strategies in Contemporary TV Series di Enrico Bandirali e Luca Terrone pag. 111 “Far Away Places”: forme del melodramma tra Mad Men, Todd Haynes e Douglas Sirk di Valentina Re Cinergie, il cinema e le altre arti2 Cinergie uscita n°11 giugno 2017 | ISSN 2280-9481 CINERGIE il cinema e le altre arti 11 INDICE ART AND MEDIA FILES pag.
    [Show full text]
  • 6 Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog for Roger, 1967. Film Strip
    Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog for Roger, 1967. Film strip. 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.30.6 by guest on 30 September 2021 Darkened Rooms: A Genealogy of Avant-Garde Filmstrips from Man Ray to the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and Back Again NOAM M. ELCOTT The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms. —André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) I. We are witnessing the reconfiguration of twentieth-century art history as a dark passage illuminated by intermittent projections. Most notably in “Le mouvement des images” (2006), a survey exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, paintings, sculp- tures, and other material objets d’art were relegated to side galleries grouped under cinematic rubrics. The spine of the exhibition was a darkened corridor with looped digital projections of films that traced a cinematic history of twentieth- century art: Richard Serra and Paul Sharits, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Broodthaers, László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.1 In each instance, the invest- ment in cinema exceeded the production of films and was augmented by a range of works in adjacent galleries. There unfolded an “immaterial” passageway surrounded by material relics. Nowhere did the division between immaterial pro- jection and material object congeal more strikingly than around a single wall on which was projected Man Ray’s Retour à la raison (1923) and behind which sev- eral meters of the film’s rayographically inscribed 35 mm filmstrips were exhib- ited as such for the first time: laid out flat for inspection like a museological artifact or specimen rather than upright like a painting, as in the case of the neatly framed filmstrips of Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1958–1960), also on view.
    [Show full text]