Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2012 Motion(less) pictures: the cinema of stasis Justin Remeselnik Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the Esthetics Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Theory and Criticism Commons Recommended Citation Remeselnik, Justin, "Motion(less) pictures: the cinema of stasis" (2012). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 472. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. MOTION(LESS) PICTURES: THE CINEMA OF STASIS by JUSTIN REMESELNIK DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2012 MAJOR: ENGLISH Approved by __________________________________ Advisor Date __________________________________ __________________________________ __________________________________ __________________________________ i ii © COPYRIGHT BY JUSTIN REMESELNIK 2012 All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to begin by thanking Kirsten Thompson, who has always gone far beyond the call of duty to help me improve as a writer and researcher (even providing me with detailed feedback on papers I wrote outside of her classes). It was Kirsten who first proposed that I write a dissertation about static films after reading an early draft of a seminar paper I wrote on the subject. Her encouraging remarks persuaded me that I had stumbled on a project worth pursuing. This dissertation simply would not exist without her tireless guidance and support. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee. I first took a class with Steve Shaviro when I was in the Masters program at Wayne State, and it was this course—with its challenging theoretical texts and bizarre yet utterly compelling films—that inspired me to pursue a PhD in Film and Media Studies. (This is also where I received my first exposure to the films of Andy Warhol.) I am also incredibly thankful to have Scott Richmond on my committee, not only because he has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of avant-garde cinema, but also because of the remarkable amount of time and energy that he has been willing to devote to helping me become a better thinker. Scott has always believed in me and my project, and for that, I cannot thank him enough. Finally, reading Roy Grundmann’s book Andy Warhol’s Blow Job was something of an epiphany for me, as it helped me to realize how much mileage a smart scholar could get out of a single simple static film. I am honored to have such a perceptive thinker and researcher on my committee. I would like to thank my father for exposing me to a broad variety of art, music, literature, and cinema from a young age (and for arguing with me for hours on end about deep philosophical topics). I would also like to thank my mother for forcing me to read a book every week as soon as I was able to, and for always offering her unconditional love and ii iii encouragement. I am forever indebted to Nana and Grandpa, who have supported me throughout the past four years in more ways than I can count. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Katrina, who has been a daily source of love, kindness, encouragement, and wisdom. Words cannot express how fortunate I am to have her in my life. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii Chapter 1: Introduction: “The Filmic” ............................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: “Serious Immobilities: Andy Warhol, Erik Satie, and the Furniture Film” ................ 33 Chapter 3: “Stasis in Fluxus: Disappearing Music for Face and Protracted Cinema” ................. 64 Chapter 4: “Structuring Time: Michael Snow’s So Is This and the Textual Film” ...................... 89 Chapter 5: “Colored Blindness: Derek Jarman’s Blue and the Monochrome Film” .................. 119 Conclusion: “Static Cinema in the 21st Century” ....................................................................... 148 Appendix 1: The Cinema of Stasis ............................................................................................. 156 Appendix 2: Films Relevant to Understanding the Cinema of Stasis ......................................... 162 Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... 166 Autobiographical Statement ....................................................................................................... 167 iv 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION THE FILMIC “[T]he more we consume moving images, the more the single still image rises above the rest, substituting itself for our reality.” – Gisèle Freund1 “There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema filmstrip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.” – Hollis Frampton2 Larry Gottheim’s film Fog Line (1970) begins with a still shot of a landscape covered in dense fog. All that can be seen through the fog are the outlines of a few trees intersected by four high-tension wires. The setting is subtly beautiful, and the complete lack of sound creates a space for meditation. Minutes pass. Apart from some slight shaking, the camera does not move, nor do any elements within the mise-en-scène. The trees and telephone wires become easier to make out as the fog lifts, although the fog’s retreat is so gradual, its movement is not perceived by the viewer. After 11 minutes of the same motionless shot, the film abruptly ends (see Figure 1). During my first viewing, I found Fog Line simultaneously boring and absorbing. I was bored because, on a superficial level, nothing happened. Yet I was fascinated because I had never encountered a film like this before. It was so still, so uneventful, I felt like I was staring at a photograph or a painting for several minutes rather than watching a movie. 1 Quoted in Raymond Bellour, “Concerning ‘The Photographic’” (trans. Chris Darke), in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, eds. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 270. 2 Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 134. 2 Figure 1: Larry Gottheim, Fog Line (1970) When I watched Fog Line a second time, I realized that there was actually more movement than I had initially registered. At one point, several minutes into the film, barely visible grainy shadows (in actuality, horses) slowly wander from one side of the landscape to the other. (Gottheim had intentionally selected this location for his film because of the horses that regularly moved through it.) At another point, a small, almost indiscernible bird quickly flies above the wires. Like most viewers, I had missed these developments in my first careful viewing; it was as if the prolonged inertia had tricked my mind into thinking I was looking at a still. I was unable to easily detect the minimal motion within the shot since, after the first few minutes of stasis, I was no longer expecting movement of any kind. Scott MacDonald describes the spectatorial experience engendered by Fog Line cogently: “For a few moments at the beginning of the film, viewers cannot be sure that the image they’re looking at is a motion 3 picture. Indeed, it is only once the fog has thinned enough for an identification of the image to be possible that we can recognize that something other than the movie projector—the fog itself—is moving.”3 While Fog Line is a remarkable and unique cinematic experience, it is not without predecessors, nor is it without successors. In fact, it places itself in a rich and variegated tradition which I will call the cinema of stasis. Static films4 offer radical challenges to conventional conceptions of cinema, since they are ostensibly motion pictures without motion. In most films, an impression of movement is provided either by the motion of the camera or the motion of elements within the mise-en-scène—usually both. In contrast, static films generally feature no camera movement, as well as little or no movement within the frame. Instead, these films foreground stasis and consequently blur the lines between traditional visual art and motion pictures.5 It should be noted that the term movement is polysemous and is sometimes used in a broader sense than what I have in mind here. For example, Gilles Deleuze suggests that movement can be achieved in film, not only through the motion of the camera or elements in the frame, but also through montage, which he claims “allows the achievement of a pure mobility extracted from the movements of characters.”6 As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, movement can refer to “a change in place or position,” and by this definition any cinematic montage (even a montage of still shots) would constitute movement. However, movement can 3 Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 9. 4 My use of the term static film should not be confused with Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s, who uses the