The History of Cinema, As Experience

The history of cinema, as experience Christa Blümlinger Film as metahistory born during the Age of Machines’, said the film- In 1998 at the Cannes Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard maker, who was born in the mid-1930s, in other – having completed his Histoire(s) du cinéma project words at a time when ‘[t]he physical principles by – presented a special reprint of the magazine Trafic. which machines “worked” were intuitively verifiable’.4 This included an article by the American artist Hollis For Frampton, who in his last films came to grips Frampton.1 Frampton’s essay, ‘For a Metahistory of with the electronic era and digital effects, cinema is Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses’, written in this sense ‘the last machine’, and also ‘the last art in 1971, has traditionally been seen as the manifesto to address intelligence through the senses’. Accord- of the experimental avant-garde or of structural ing to Frampton, the end of this Age of Machines film. How can this spiritual kinship, unexpectedly arrived in the early 1940s with the invention of radar, embraced by Godard, be explained? Frampton does enabling the observation of airspace by mechani- not appear in Godard’s Histoire(s), any more than cal means via an ‘anonymous’ black box. Frampton Peter Kubelka, Ernie Gehr or Michael Snow does. associates this quantum leap into the techniques What lurks behind this suddenly close relationship of control with the birth of American avant-garde between two different traditions of the avant-garde? cinema as an independent movement, represented by To use Peter Wollen’s terminology, is it a matter of the films of Willard Maas or Maya Deren. bringing the ‘introverted ontology’ of ‘pure’ cinema, At the same moment when Frampton was working concerned with its own essence, into contact with on grounding American avant-garde cinema in the ‘extraverted ontology’, influenced by André Bazin, the history of technique – by defining the art of of what has become known as the second avant- cinema through the historicity of its material and its garde?2 Should the dissociation between these two mechanical dispositif 5 – Godard had written a project avant-gardes, maintained over the years by both film- for a ‘cinematographic essay’, Moi Je, whose second makers and critics, be symbolically removed after the part was entitled ‘I Am a Machine’ (‘Moi, je suis une fact? In Frampton’s attempt to take an aesthetics of machine’). However, unlike Frampton, Godard did form and material and from it develop a conception not aim to establish a material aesthetics. Various of history making it possible to think of cinema influences can be identified in his unfinished project: as art, Godard seems to recognize the inspiration cybernetic models, concepts borrowed from Gilles behind his own Histoire(s). Starting in the early 1970s, Deleuze and Félix Guattari,6 but also, already, the probably under the influence of his discovery of will to work with video and to think about cinema electronic image technologies, Godard also became afresh.7 In 1973, Godard asked a question in this interested in thinking about history in a filmic form. context: ‘Who will write a real history of cinema Like Frampton, he sought to develop from within and television someday?’8 Although the project is cinema a form equivalent to the theory of knowledge, presented in the form of a collage of appropriated one which would not concern the construction so material with glaring joins between some elements much as the function of (film) history. and shattered associations among others, Moi Je is Frampton considered cinema an epistemological clearly intended to be taken as an essay, not a self- model, when seen as a whole.3 He published his text portrait in the pictorial sense of the term, much less on the ‘metahistory of film’ in the magazine Artforum, an autobiography. in order to present one of his fundamental ideas on When Frampton started concentrating on film in the ‘metahistorical’ function of avant-garde cinema the 1960s, alongside photography, he decided to come to a readership made up of art enthusiasts. ‘I was to terms with the art of his friends Frank Stella and RadicaL PhiLosoPhy 192 (juLy/auG 2015) 15 Carl Andre,9 who were working with serial and geo- in any imaginable way to construct or reconstruct a metric forms in order to emphasize the materiality of new work’.11 the canvas or to translate the principle of repetition Cinema as a medium and a vector of historical into a sculptural form. With films like (nostalgia) thought is therefore the potential to rewrite; the (1971) or Poetic Justice (1972), Frampton contributed possibility of re-creation. The machinic character of on the level of image and language theory, asking the metacritical function of filmic art is associated radical questions that subjected cinema to a new by Frampton with another essential dimension: film grammatological treatment, revealing its signitive is ‘kinema’, the illusion of a movement, based on a nature. In (nostalgia), he pushes the mimetic faculty minute variation of the speed of the film’s passage in of photography to its limits in a twofold movement: the projector; ‘There is nothing in the structural logic first, by presenting his own photographs on screen of the filmstrip that can justify such an assumption.’12 and by literally giving them an incandescent quality, This is why an ‘infinite film’, according to Frampton, burning them one after the other, before the eyes of should contain both the possible identity and differ- the viewers, leading them to study the images more ence of its component images. Frampton conceives closely; then, by describing the images with a time of film as a system of notation that, as in Western lag, through the use of a falsely autobiographical music, is fulfilled only in execution. ‘The film strip is voice (in reality that of Michael Snow). Finally, with an elegant device for modulating standardized beams Poetic Justice, Frampton gives radical form to the of energy.’13 The projector or the system of projection question of the semiotic relationships of designation, is thus raised to the status of a central element of the by making words the only subject of his film. It is filmic experience. composed of a series of words written down on sepa- rate sheets that are placed one after the other in front The history of images: Fisher of the camera. Their succession and accumulation The same year that Hollis Frampton died, Morgan conjure up a screenplay, a possible film, the result of Fisher – an artist and avant-garde film-maker – made a mnemonic construction on the part of the viewer. a film that could be seen as homage to (nostalgia), In his outline for a ‘metahistory’ of cinema, but also as an application of Frampton’s schema of Frampton simultaneously emphasizes the critical and a ‘metahistory of film’. His experimental ‘documen- metahistorical functions of the art of film, by intro- tary’ Standard Gauge (1984) is constructed, with a ducing an unusual distinction between historians rare level of radicalness, out of the material and the and metahistorians. For Frampton, the first stands dispositif of film-making. In line with Frampton’s before a multitude, a ‘treasure’ of films, not all of work in (nostalgia), small pieces of footage collected which are masterpieces – far from it – and that belong from the trash cans of the editing rooms of American to domains as different as educational films, amateur studios offer an opportunity to make associations films, or what Frampton calls ‘endoscopic cinema- of an autobiographical nature. On the ‘metahistori- tography’,10 in other words utilitarian cinema. The cal’ level, it is again a matter of demonstrating the historian answers ‘for every existing filmic image’. limits of a memorializing narrative founded on the The metahistorian, on the other hand, invents a signifying dimension of images, and of establishing tradition, by selecting and defining a single artistic the fictional character of factographic constructions. domain. Starting from the archive as a material basis, On the ‘historical’ level, the film presents fragments Frampton – by way of a positivist exaggeration – of a subhistory of Hollywood that concerns itself thus sees the film historian as confronted by the with the economic and social determinations of virtual corpus of all existing films, while associating technique. The standardization of the 35mm format, the metahistorian – who is ultimately a metaphor which serves as an explanation of the film’s title, is for an avant-garde film-maker – with another form presented through stories tied to the production of of virtual infinity. This infinity is no longer con- a particular film (an appearance in and a job as an nected to the macro-level of the corpus of all films, assistant on a film by Roger Corman), personal tastes but to the micro-level of the body of an individual (the archive of stock shots), technical specifics (the use film. Frampton stresses the reiterable nature and of Technicolor or Cinemascope) or the recontextual- the malleability of the ‘filmed material’: ‘There is no ization of a frame of film by the soundtrack. Starting evidence in the structural logic of the filmstrip that with a simple fragment, Fisher retraces the origin of distinguishes ‘footage’ from a ‘finished’ work. Thus, a film, whether through the images it contains, its any piece of film may be regarded as ‘footage’, for use soundtrack, its sprockets or its formal construction. 16 Morgan Fisher, Standard Gauge Standard The tangible gesture of presentation – the insertion are left alone: for a long time no voice guides them of a short strip of film into the camera’s field of vision further in the exploration of the material.

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