Search Results

Chapter 2 addresses a third wave of expanded cinema, running from the mid-1990s to the present. Though in dialogue with art world developments, particularly the prevalence of moving images in that world, this wave again rose out of the theory and practice of avant-garde cinema. Hence, it reflects that film culture’s skepticism about digital technology, media convergence, and the “death” of cinema. Chapter 2 considers two major factors in the resurgence of expanded cinema. The first is the spread of digital technology and the implications of this for filmmaking and the theorization of cinema’s ontology. In the wake of “new media’s” ascendency in the “digital age,” experimental filmmakers and critics took up a renewed investigation of the nature of cinema and the role that specific physical media (e.g., celluloid film) play in our conception it. Prominent theorists of new media have argued against such specificity positions, employing concepts like “remediation” and “media convergence,” which speak to a merging of media and art forms quite contrary to the broadly modernist notions of avant-garde filmmakers—including those who produced expanded cinema during its “second wave.” The second major factor for expanded cinema’s new life is the microcinema, a form of film exhibition specific to experimental cinema that appeared across the United States, Canada, and Europe beginning the mid-1990s. Microcinemas are characterized by a highly participatory social environment, wherein film screenings blend into other kinds of social activity. Microcinemas are thus models for expanded cinema, each showcasing cinema’s adaptability to varying spaces and formal heterogeneity.

Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing aesthetic territory and ideas usually associated with a different art form (e.g. performance or sculpture). Chapter 3 considers a variant of expanded cinema that integrates live performance into projection of moving images, usually called “projection performance” or “projector performance.” In this type of expanded work, the tactility of both filmstrip and projector are on display, as is the performer (typically the filmmaker—the representative of avant-garde cinema’s more intimate relationship between artist and audience). But alongside these markers of cinema’s physicality and presence is the ephemerality of live performance. Non-repeatable, site-specific, aleatory instead of mechanistically automatic, projection performance is centered upon the moment when the material of film is transformed into the far less tactile play of light, shadow, and illusion, and when objects give way to processes and experiences. The integration of performance into cinema was initially understood as a blurring of art forms. But the intermedia film-theater hybrids of the first wave of expanded cinema gave way to subsequent projection performances that claimed a performative dimension for cinema itself, rather than thinking of it as an alien form grafted onto film in a new intermedia format.

Chapter 4 looks at works of expanded cinema that emphasize what could be called a “sculptural” property—the physicality and tactility of a moving image medium (e.g. film, projectors, screens). These works isolate one material element of the film medium, such as the filmstrip, screen, or projector, removing it from its place in a system of machines and displaying it as an object in its own right. In doing so, such works break apart the unified machine of the cinematic apparatus, pulling the objects that constitute that apparatus out of the obscurity and endowing them with aesthetic qualities. In normal cinematic exhibition, these objects disappear, replaced by the ephemeral experience of watching the illusory images of light and shadow that they invisibly produce. Object-based works of expanded cinema reverse this process, returning the sense of mass, weight, and gravity to the materials of the medium, thereby forcing a new consideration of the possibilities film offers for direct, sensuous physical experiences. Such expanded cinema works include direct displays of filmstrips (e.g. woven forms made from celluloid), projectors, and other physical materials, objects, and technologies.

Chapter 5 examines works of expanded cinema that emphasize another, somewhat different “sculptural” property—cinema’s spatial dimension. Such works heighten awareness of cinema’s spatial dimension, blurring the line between temporal and spatial arts in a way similar to minimalist sculpture. The major form here is film installation, which, rather than exploding the cinematic apparatus as the object-based works of chapter 4 do, brings that apparatus out of the dark, presenting it for contemplation and analysis in a way that conventional film exhibition intentionally thwarts. The sculptural characteristics of such works often requires that they be exhibited in gallery spaces, which suggests that they are “intermedial” hybrids of cinema and sculpture. But this hybridity is only apparent; in fact, these works were asserted and understood within the context of avant-garde film culture as “cinematic.” In examining these types of expanded work, this chapter considers key historical factors during both the early-to-mid ’70s and the last two decades. During the 1960s and ’70s, the attention given to cinema’s physical properties, including the space of exhibition, was related to the anti-illusionist aims of avant-garde filmmakers for whom “materiality” included the space of cinematic exhibition and the ideological ramifications of that space. More recently, the impending obsolescence of analog film and the presumed ephemerality of digital media have resulted in the former’s physical “object”–properties taking on new meaning and importance.

This chapter discusses Amos Vogel, who was one of two (the other was his wife Maria) who sought to show avant-garde films in New York. Their idea for a film society came from their time as being patrons of New York City's most influential avant-garde filmmaker, Maya Deren. The Vogels then tried showing films that they knew were not being seen with any regularity in the city, leading to their Cinema 16 to becoming unique and significant.

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.

This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.

This chapter explores how film came into its own as an autonomous art practice in installation. It first considers the material, procedural, industrial, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, political and ontological specificities of film, encompassing moving image in both popular culture and art. It then examines how avant-garde film became so heavily academicized that watching films was now understood to be what A. L. Rees called “an act of reading” rather than the opportunity to go on a journey of “visual emotion” as Virginia Woolf suggested. In particular, it discusses the staging of mainstream, illusionist cinema, along with its disassembly by syntactical critique and material interference in the work of avant-garde filmmakers. It also looks at tendencies that carried over into expanded cinema and installation, primarily work that was concerned with the physical presence of the filmic apparatus and artists who undertook the deconstruction of cinematic codes driven by broadly leftist and feminist political convictions. Finally, it analyzes the illusionism of film in relation to the presupposition of indexicality.

This chapter studies several of Dulac's early narrative Impressionist films, and her ideal of cinema as a spatiotemporally complex universe of symbols—one in which meaning is created through an intertextual network of figurative associations, such as pictorial and rhythmic gesture. Dulac's integral approach, based on life, movement, and rhythm, exemplified in a surviving extract of what is considered the first Impressionist film, La Fête espagnole (1920), is used in a particularly innovative and feminist manner in one of her earliest extant films, La Belle Dame sans merci (1921). Dulac's use of dance as a discursive metaphor disrupts a heteronormative, monogamous, and linear narrative structure, creating a queer subtext in her later films, both commercial and avant-garde.

This chapter examines the once controversial claim that the revolutionary impact of modernist art might as easily be found in cinema as in “higher” arts like literature, painting, and music. It also extends the inclusion of cinema in canonical modernism to consider both how cinema helped constitute modernism itself and how discourse on cinema, serving as an index of what had changed in modern life, produced the kind of comprehensive narrative about culture now integral to cultural studies. In order to also focus on what cultural studies can say about modernism, the chapter discusses the pivotal modernist tension between mass culture and revolutionary art, considering, on the one hand, avant-garde film and, on the other, auteur cinema, which has both popular and avant-garde forms.

The opening chapter, ‘The Camera-I: Patrick Keiller’s Early Short Films and Essays’, reconstructs Keiller’s early career and his shift from architecture to film-making, reading the use of ‘subjective camera’ and the creation of ‘subjective townscape’ in his early experimental works as crucial to the developing sensibility of his later docu-narratives. Excavating a history of the ‘London Film-makers’ Co-op’ and examining Keiller’s early essays before looking at the short films Stonebridge Park (1981) and Norwood (1983), it explores the ‘atmosphere of unemployed reverie’ and paranoiac, noir methods that provided a footing for the later Robinson series. At the same time, it offers a view of the exciting world of political agitation and experimental film of 1960s London.

This case-study chapter focuses on the blanket rejection of both subtitling and dubbing at New York’s short-lived Invisible Cinema, established by Anthology Film Archives in the early 1970s. In resurrecting the silent-era dream of non-translation, the Invisible Cinema drew attention, paradoxically, to translation’s centrality for screen culture generally and Anthology in particular – pinpointing the re-evaluative role that translation plays in screen culture by keeping ‘originals’ in circulation and contention. This point is affirmed by Anthology’s present-day operations and the residual legacy of its translation ban. Additionally, the chapter explores how the Invisible Cinema’s excessive zero-tolerance approach to translation actually takes certain pro-subtitling arguments to their logical conclusion and is hence ripe for deconstruction. Hence, this chapter outlines a route for revaluation developed further in subsequent chapters, identifying the flaws and failures of screen translation as necessary to the preservation and destabilisation of screen culture.

This chapter addresses the question of how dramatic texts become film images and sounds through stylization and abstraction in two avant-garde films, Jean–Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Antigone and Gregory Markopoulos' Illiac Passion. The two films explore the workings and limits of the transmissibility of texts, drawing out connections between recitation and prophetic messages or evidence brought to the attention of a court jury.

This chapter presents the effects of Lettrist experimentation as it relates to visual art's relationship with avant-garde film in postwar Europe. With their films, the Lettrists enlisted various artistic practices, consciously framing their work in relation to multiple histories: from the modern novel and sound poetry, to theatre and painting. Lettrist cinema emerges as a crucial site for establishing an alternative genealogy for the intersections between art and film in the postwar moments as well as the critique of the institution of art. Lettrist work with film is critical of formal categories, testing the conventional limits of the medium through the chiseling of the image and attention to sound. In subsequent years, they extended such experimentation through the production of imaginary, infinitesimal, and supertemporal films.

This chapter examines the centrality of the work of artistic duo Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki to the project of writing a feminist women's film history by focusing on the aesthetic and conceptual choices they made and on their thought-provoking contributions to feminist film practice. In particular, it considers Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body). The chapter suggests that the female avant-garde film has, paradoxically, been marginalized by feminist film theory's focus on mainstream cinema as a site of patriarchal representation and spectatorship. It shows that Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel represents, for women's cinema, a strategy of dissidence. In form, content, concept, and approach, it calls for a revisitation of “film” outside the canon established in traditional film history. The chapter underscores the need to “heighten the visibility of women's contributions to traditions of formal innovation and explore how formal innovation enables women to enlarge discourses about women's subjectivity” and art.

The conclusion argues that while expanded cinema might seem radically opposed to conventional, popular, and mainstream cinema, it nonetheless attempts to articulate and specify the aesthetic qualities that define all cinema. This parallels a trait of conventionally made avant-garde/experimental films; the assertion of cinema’s nature and essences, which constitute all forms of cinema regardless of how different one kind of film appears from another. The conclusion also draws upon the notions of the “essentially cinematic” explored across the book to counter theoretical arguments against such specificity positions (e.g. medium specificity) that have been advanced by critics and scholars in the worlds of cinema and art. The conclusion argues that these anti-specificity positions are overly simplistic, and that expanded cinema represents a more nuanced and sophisticated notion of what a medium specific theory—or work of cinema—can be.

This chapter discusses Ronald Freedman's efforts to fight for the freedom of the screen. Freedman initially wanted to become a crusader for avant-garde films, but due to the interference of censorship, he was incited to become a free speech advocate instead. The case that Freedman was involved with turned out to be the big case in the razing of governmental film censorship.

The introduction to this study explores the notion of audiovisuality as it pertains to John Cage’s interaction with avant-garde filmmakers. Moving from the corporeal notion of Cage’s “everyday awareness,” audiovisuality is akin to the lived phenomenal experience. Artworks expressing such an awareness point to our understanding of the self and the lived experience. Such a framework allows for the exploration of a number of issues concerning “Cage Studies,” the flood of academic literature from the past two decades that has attempted to situate Cage’s complex aesthetic stances within 20th- and 21st-century theories of history.