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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.

The international scope of Hong Kong's alternative cinema scene comes into sharp focus in this conversation with Roger Garcia, John Woo, and award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Jessica Hagedorn. Roger Garcia writes about cinema, programs films for festivals in the United States and Europe, and has produced box-office hit movies in Hollywood and independent films in Asia. John Woo is co-founder and executive producer at Woo Art International in New York City. The conversation begins with a discussion of a representative program of experimental films by three filmmakers—Jim Shum, Comyn Mo, and Raymond Red, all produced in Hong Kong and Manila in the 1980s under Garcia's Modern Films Productions company, and shown at the Hollywood/Hong Kong at the Borders: Alternative Perspectives, Alternative Cinema symposium in April 2004.

This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films might be made into 8mm reduction prints and made available for sale to home collectors. This chapter relates this little-known historical episode and questions what relevance this prioritization of access over quality might have for us in the contemporary moment, when these terms are once again embroiled in a fierce battle.

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.

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.

This chapter explores the altered body maps of haptics and synaesthesia in short experimental films with spiritual and erotic material. It provides a critical analysis of several relevant films including Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment, Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man and Tony Conrad's The Flicker. The chapter suggests that films stimulate virtual sensation and induce affect by haptics and synaesthesia, and argues that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's reconceptualisation of the body as anorganic is both radical and contentious.

This chapter challenges the aesthetic paradigm of “synaesthesia,” the banner under which sound so often appears in visual arts contexts today. It argues that, in contemporary art, the discourse of synaesthesia is predominantly conservative and recuperative, ultimately supporting the dominance of the visual and resisting the incursion of sound into visual arts spaces. Exploring the tensions between the assimilation and the segregation of sound and image in the history of modern visual art and film, the chapter shows how contemporary filmmakers and video artists such as Mathias Poledna, Manon DeBoer, Julian Rosefeldt, Luke Fowler, and the Sensory Ethnography Lab propose counter-strategies that reject the fantasy of sensorial fusion and instead affirm productive differences and tensions between sound and image, seeing and hearing.

Very few amateur women filmmakers chose to focus on animation and none have been identified in the colonial settings considered in this book. This chapter discusses varied approaches to animation and suggests that early stop motion experiments were entertaining acts of story-telling and capturing scenes of childhood. Some filmmakers added animated titling sequences to their films and used special visual effects, either working on their own, with a partner or as part of a larger group as seen in films by the Grasshopper Group and Leeds Animation Workshop. Working at home characterises many of this chapter's examples although some teachers have explored animation with children of different ages. IAC records and reminiscences trace over eighty years of women's involvement including still active practitioners and many invisible and under-acknowledged contributors to Britain's professional mid century animation industry

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.

Referring to contemporaneous writings by Kracauer, Bazin and Malraux among others, the first chapter discusses the ‘Golden Age’ of the art documentary in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Supported by international institutions such as UNESCO and FIAF, a film d'art movement developed, which offered experimental filmmakers a platform to reflect on the relations between art and cinema. Focusing on films made by Emmer in Italy, Storck and Haesaerts in Belgium and Resnais in France, this chapter demonstrates how these filmmakers saw the genre of the art documentary as a means to investigate the boundaries of film by juxtaposing movement versus stasis, narrative versus iconic images, and cinematic space versus pictorial surface.

This chapter, by Haidee Wasson, addresses the development and use of portable film projectors by the American military during World War II and after. It examines the close ties to the technological wing of the American film industry and situates the innovation and use of film projectors in the context of ongoing experiments with projectors, projection, and film viewing within the armed services. This includes a discussion of standard operating equipment that became widely integrated into military operations as well as more specialized devices: gunnery trainers, consoles, data analyzers, and dynamic projection devices that made moving images into elastic, animated performance pieces. This chapter demonstrates that the military developed an expansive, global viewing platform that normalized film presentation and viewing within a wide range of military activities. This was an unprecedented use of portable film technology, and it helped to catalyze its postwar proliferation in military and civilian life thereafter.

This chapter studies Maya Deren's first and most canonical film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which is considered one of the most recognizable touchstones of American experimental film, as well as her second film, Witch's Cradle (1943). These two early films show that a shifting balance between key binaries—incompletion/completion, control/contingency, stasis/motion, objective/subjective, etc.—propels Deren's films. Her work draws its vitality from negotiating these binaries without ever resolving them, drawing on the establishment of a “tension plateau” between elements. Challenging traditional narrative resolution and valorizing the process at least as much as the final product, each of these early films from 1943 to a greater owes its appeal and meaning to these negotiations, amounting to a not completely stabilized text, and to varying degrees of success in the end.

The inherent social, political, economic, and cultural contradictions of postcolonial Africa have prompted some filmmakers to escape the everyday and find a new starting point for their work. From the beginning of the 1970s too, a number of filmmakers argued that new formal structures, owing far less to the conventions of mainstream Western cinema, were needed if African cinemas were to reflect the reality of postcolonial rule from a truly African perspective. Over the past forty years, there has been a constant, dominant stream of socially realist films which accept identity as a given and are based on a sense of common historical experiences and shared cultural codes. Alternative or experimental films which call into question that approach have been sporadic, though none the less valuable for that. Most often these have been isolated, individual works within the overall output of a filmmaker who has earlier worked in, or subsequently reverts to, the realist mainstream.

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 characterises the music and sound of queer experimental film. It starts out with a historical revision of some social, cinematographic and musical developments that impinged on the evolution of queer experimental film. It then theorises about the possibility of a queer sound and music. And it subsequently characterises three modalities of aural queerness: camp, noisiness and dissonance. These modes share an epistemic uncertainty about the location and the very matter of what counts as queer, so that queerness has to be explored as an open question or a potential frame of reference; as a possibility that is communicated by sound just as much as by the image. The chapter takes as examples of these modes both historical filmmakers, such as Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and Barbara Hammer, and more recent ones, such as Hans Scheirl, David Domingo, Jennifer Reeves, Luther Price and William E. Jones.

This chapter discusses contemporary approaches to analogue film, building towards a new theory of materialist film in the context of philosophical perspectives on ‘new materialism’ by writers such as Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti and Timothy Morton. It frames materialist interventions such as burying film and using body fluids on the surface of the filmstrip as a political gesture that forges a new ethically conscious relationship to the world. Reflecting on Peter Gidal’s critique of representation in his ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ (1975), I argue that the politics of representation manifests differently in contemporary materialist work by drawing attention to a new aesthetics of contact.

This chapter examines the rapid and accelerating technological transformations to film that have been happening in the last decade. These transformations make it anachronistic to speak solely of film and require the analysis of a more inclusive moving image. Moreover, these transformations have occurred simultaneously with the developments of globalization and transnationalism. Broadband, streaming video, and networked social relationships have been central to the formation of new communities and new forms of engagement with existing social conditions. The chapter seeks to highlight the interconnection between technology politics and economy by focusing on the question of moving-image experiments and migration. It focuses on the works of filmmakers who have worked in an experimental mode.