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In the film laboratory, China Girl reference images used in maintaining ideal appearance are literally marginalized on the ends of the filmstrip. Translated into numeric values, the bodies of China Girl models are instrumentalized for quality control procedures, transformed into industrial material embedded in the photochemistry of film. For this to happen, the woman’s body is first dematerialized and then disappears, a process that correlates to the production of the film image. While the laboratory uses of the China Girl are assumed to be rational and objective, this chapter shows that they are often more ideological than they are taken to be. The chapter concludes with a survey of experimental films that foreground the China Girl, including films that reproduce the marginalization of the figure or, from a feminist perspective, critique the laboratory procedures that determine the terms of the China Girl’s liminal appearance.

Chapter One examines the work of the “Grupo Goethe,” and in particular two filmmakers, Caldini and Hirsch, who formed part of this group of experimental filmmakers who began working in the late 1960s and continue today. Intermedial and generic instability or indiscipline are central to the filmmakers’ novel and creative approaches to both film and poetry. What is of particular interest to this chapter is the conception of “poetic” cinema developed by these filmmakers and those who study them. Caldini and Hirsch’s works reveal a conception of “poetic” cinema as opposed to narrative cinema, but not linked in any strong sense to poetry as a literary genre or even a linguistic phenomenon. An assessment of their work based on close analysis of their films obliges us to rethink the easy association of “experimental” and “poetic” cinemas, before moving on to a consideration of their links to so-called “expanded cinema,” including the use of film in performance, and what this tells us about intermediality on screen.

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 book addresses some of the many and varied ways in which filmmakers in Argentina engage with poetry on screen. It asks, in the broadest terms, how film and poetry transform each another, how these two expressive media behave when placed into conversation, and what this tells us about the relationship between the two art forms. This is a dialogue that I refer to elsewhere the “poetry-film nexus.” How, to put it shortly, do directors film poetry? The introduction outlines the theoretical background and cultural context to the case studies found in the chapters, also summarized here.

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.

This chapter explores the work of Doris Wishman and Carolee Schneemann, two women whose work explores the implications of being a woman, and what it meant to inhabit a body coded female. While the chapter addresses Wishman’s work in the context of exploitation cinema, and her cinema’s relationship to the more established avant-garde and the ways in which her work deserves placement in the avant-garde, it primarily initiates a conversation between Wishman and Schneemann’s work by analyzing the ways they both centralize female bodies in their films and demonstrate the complexities of depicting female nudity.

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.

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.

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

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.

This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.