Annette Michelson’s contribution to art and film criticism over the last three decades has been un- paralleled. This volume honors Michelson’s unique C AMERA OBSCURA, CAMERA LUCIDA ALLEN AND TURVEY [EDS.] LUCIDA CAMERA OBSCURA, AMERA legacy with original essays by some of the many film FILM FILM scholars influenced by her work. Some continue her efforts to develop historical and theoretical frame- CULTURE CULTURE works for understanding modernist art, while others IN TRANSITION IN TRANSITION practice her form of interdisciplinary scholarship in relation to avant-garde and modernist film. The intro- duction investigates and evaluates Michelson’s work itself. All in some way pay homage to her extraordi- nary contribution and demonstrate its continued cen- trality to the field of art and film criticism. Richard Allen is Associ- ate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York Uni- versity. Malcolm Turvey teaches Film History at Sarah Lawrence College. They recently collaborated in editing Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (Lon- don: Routledge, 2001). CAMERA OBSCURA CAMERA LUCIDA ISBN 90-5356-494-2 Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson EDITED BY RICHARD ALLEN 9 789053 564943 MALCOLM TURVEY Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press WWW.AUP.NL Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson Edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey Amsterdam University Press Front cover illustration: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Courtesy of Photofest Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 90 5356 494 2 (paperback) nur 652 © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2003 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, me- chanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permis- sion of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Acknowledgements 7 Preface 9 Rosalind Krauss Introduction 13 Malcolm Turvey The Logic of an Illusion 35 Notes on the Genealogy of Intellectual Cinema Mikhail Iampolski Narcissistic Machines and Erotic Prostheses 51 Allen S. Weiss Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion 75 Body, Light, Electricity and the Origins of Cinema Tom Gunning Visitings of Awful Promise 91 The Cinema Seen from Etna Stuart Liebman Transfiguring the Urban Gray 109 László Moholy-Nagy’s Film Scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’ Edward Dimendberg Eisenstein’s Philosophy of Film 127 Noël Carroll 6 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida Knight’s Moves 147 Peter Wollen Hitchcock and Narrative Suspense 163 Theory and Practice Richard Allen From the Air 183 A Genealogy of Antonioni’s Modernism Noa Steimatsky Dr. Strangelove 215 or: the Apparatus of Nuclear Warfare William G. Simon Collection and Recollection 231 On Film Itineraries and Museum Walks Guiliana Bruno Afterward: A Matter of Time 261 Analog Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and Its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey Babette Mangolte Select Bibliography 275 List of Contributors 283 Index 286 Acknowledgements A number of individuals have made this book possible. The editors are pro- foundly grateful to Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell and The Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, for providing a grant to underwrite publication of this volume. Chris Straayer, Chair of the Cinema Studies Department at New York University also gave unwavering support to our endeavor. Thomas Elsaesser rescued the volume by his willingness to give space to a festschrift in his series at Amsterdam University Press. Without his commitment, it would not have been published. Finally we wish to thank Suzanne Bogman and Jaap Wagenaar for shepherding the book through publication, and Lucas Hilder- brand for his editorial assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. Preface Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson returned to New York from France in the mid-1960s with an intimate knowledge of French language and culture. This meant, among other things, that a whole world of intellectual speculation was open to her that remained closed to less linguistically gifted American colleagues. In the late ’60s, the translation business had not yet geared up to process the work of Barthes, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida into English; and so the Structur- alist reconception of language – in all its subtlety and elegance – had not yet impacted the world of aesthetic discourse. In 1970,inArt and the Structuralist Perspective, her lecture at the Guggenheim Museum, Michelson spoke of the el- egance and reduction of Structuralist diagrams in an effort to fuse cultural practice and this new domain of conceptualization. In closing, she passed to what she saw as the disappointment of Structuralism’s hostility to abstract art, a philistinism unworthy of the movement’s extraordinarily formal thinkers.1 Michelson’s critical project had, from her entry into New York’s thriving art world, committed itself to those painters, sculptors, and dancers whose work would have been most recalcitrant to these Parisian heroes even though, in her eyes, it should in fact have been most available to the proponents of system, exchange, and the formalization of meaning. In January 1967, Michelson eagerly reviewed an exhibition that her col- leagues at Artforum shunned from a sense of its difficulty, its closure against the universe of discourse. This was ‘10 x 10,’ an exhibition at the Dwan Gallery of the work of Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Ad Reinhardt, and Michael Steiner – the burgeoning movement of Minimalism which Michelson had embraced immediately upon her arrival. Her review spoke of this difficulty and the way it had produced the vocabu- lary of dismissal in the early critical literature, as words such as ‘rejective,’ ‘ag- gressive,’ and ‘boring’ were applied to it. Her assessment of the situation was quickly stated: ‘The problem, as I see it, is the increasingly urgent necessity of some conceptual or philosophical framework within which criticism can pro- pose a comprehension of the dynamics of art history and of art making.’2 The opportunity to craft such a conceptual framework came in 1969 when Michelson was commissioned to write the text for Robert Morris’s major exhi- bition at the Corcoran Museum, and the central proponent of Minimalism had to be introduced to an audience who would probably find his work, indeed, 10 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida ‘reductive’ and ‘boring.’ Initially, she turned to American figures rather than French ones for models of a rejection of ‘expressiveness.’ Both John Cage and Charles Sanders Peirce figured here. From Peirce came the concept of ‘firstness’: ‘a sense of quality rather than a perception. Non-cognitive, it is “ab- solutely present”.’ But then, acknowledging the dependence of Morris’s work on the precise conditions of its context and on their effect on the viewer’s own body, her references turned to France and the philosophy of Maurice Merleau- Ponty. Speaking of Morris’s earliest public manifestation at the Green Gallery and the experience it forced on the viewer, she wrote: ... that experience – the ‘reduction’ on which it is posited, its reflexiveness, the man- ner in which it illuminates the nature of our feeling and knowing through an object, a spatial situation, suggest an aesthetic analogy to the posture and method of phenomenological inquiry, as it is familiar to us in the tradition of contemporary philosophy. It is the commitment to the exact particularity of experience, to the ex- perience of a sculptural object as inextricably involved with the sense of self and of that space which is their common dwelling...3 From Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on ‘knowledge through the body’ to Morris’s beginnings in the dance projects of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, com- monly referred to as the dance of ‘task performance,’ Michelson was quickly led to a concern with dance and theater as the accompanying aesthetic mode of Minimalism. Approaching Artforum with the project for a special issue on per- formance, she found nothing but resistance, a refusal paired with the editorial rejection of proposals to translate central theoretical texts from French into English. One of these, Michel Foucault’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’ found its way into the first issue of October, the journal Michelson founded with me once both of us had resigned from the editorial board of the magazine. Our project for October began as an arm of contemporary avant-garde prac- tice, understanding that practice as overtly theoretical, given the conceptual complexity of the recent essays published by Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Theorizing such practice meant not only translating important theoretical texts but attempting, as well, to locate the specificity of new forms of practice, such as video – the medium that had been adopted by many advanced artists in the early 1970s. This aspect of the project was in evidence in the first issue, and is still in evidence in our recently published 100th issue. Working with Annette Michelson on this magazine has been an adventure in the conceptual- ization of many aspects of advanced art – from film to sculpture, from perfor- mance to dance. Throughout, her commitment has been exemplary. Preface 11 Notes 1. Annette Michelson, ‘Art and the Structuralist Perspective,’ On the Future of Art (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a Viking Compass Book, 1970), pp. 37-59. 2. Michelson, ‘10 x 10: Concrete Reasonableness,’ Artforum V, no. 5 (January 1967), pp. 30-31. 3. Michelson, Robert Morris: The Aesthetic of Transgression, exhibition catalogue (Washington D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969). Excerpts reprinted as ‘Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression,’ in Mimimalism, ed. James Meyer (Lon- don: Phaidon, 2000), pp. 248-50. Introduction Malcolm Turvey Annette Michelson, in her multiple roles as critic, editor, translator, and teacher has made a unique contribution to the study of artistic modernism.