FILM
CULTURE
IN TRANSITION
THEORIZING FILM THROUGH
CONTEMPORARY ART
EXPANDING CINEMA
E D I T E D BY
JILL MURPHY
LAURA RASCAROLI
Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art
Theorizing Film Through
Contemporary Art
Expanding Cinema
Edited by
Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli
Amsterdam University Press
Cover illustration: Tacita Dean, FILM (2011). Photograph by Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkly
© Tate
Cover design: Kok korpershoek, Amsterdam
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn
e-isbn
doi
nur
978 94 6298 946 7
978 90 4854 202 4
10.5117/9789462989467
670
© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020
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, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
In memory of my mother, Mary Murphy, who was wise, warm, and true. (JM)
To Mara – cousin, twin, friend – to the sinuous fabric of love that connected
our lives in proximity and distance, to the anguish of the tear, to the day
when it might heal. (LR)
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
9
Acknowledgments
13
Foreword: Courtesy of the Artists
15
Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder
Introduction: On Cinema Expanding
33
Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli
Part One
Materialities
1 Cinema as (In)Visible Object
49
Looking, Making, and Remaking
Matilde Nardelli
2 Objects in Time
69
Artefacts in Artists’ Moving Image
Alison Butler
3 Materializing the Body of the Actor
83
Labour, Memory, and Storage
Maeve Connolly
4 How to Spell ‘Film’
101
Gibson + Recoder’s Alphabet of Projection
Volker Pantenburg
Part Two
Immaterialities
5 The Magic of Shadows
Distancing and Exposure in William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play
the Dance
Jill Murphy
123
8
TAble oF ConTenTs
6 Douglas Gordon and the Gallery of the Mind
143
Sarah Cooper
7 A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance
157
Tacita Dean’s Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)
Kirstie North
Part Three
Temporalities
8 The Photo-Filmic Diorama
175
Ágnes Pethő
9 The Cinematic Dispositif and Its Ghost
195
Sugimoto’s Theaters
Stefano Baschiera
10 Time/Frame: On Cinematic Duration
213
Laura Rascaroli
Part Four
The Futures of the Image
11 Interactivity without Control
231
David OReilly’s Everything (2017) and the Representation of Totality
Andrew V. Uroskie
12 Post-Cinematic Unframing
255
Lisa Åkervall
13 Absolute Immanence
277
D. N. Rodowick
Index
293
List of Illustrations
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Gibson + Recoder, Light Spill (2005). Modified 16mm
film projector, film, screen, dimensions variable.
Installation view, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, the
Netherlands, 2016. Photo by Hans Wilschut.
Gibson + Recoder, Threadbare (2013). 16mm film
projector, reels, film, 27 x 35 x 12 inches. Courtesy of
Gibson + Recoder Studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2013. Photo by
Rachel Hamburger.
Gibson + Recoder, Illuminatoria (2016). Hand-blown
glass, rheostat motors, lighting kit, Lucite, hardware,
114 x 80 inches. Installation view, Exploratorium, San
Francisco, CA, 2016. Photo by Gayle Laird.
Gibson + Recoder, The Changeover System (2017). Two
screening rooms, two multi-reel feature-length 35mm
films, four 35mm film projectors, hand-blown glass,
rheostat motors, hardware, variable duration. Dance
choreography by Douglas Dunn. Sound composition by
Brian Case. Performance view, Gene Siskel Film Center,
Chicago, IL, 2017.
Courtesy of Conversations At The Edge & School of the
Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo by Connor Fenwick.
Philippe Parreno, Hypothesis, HangarBicocca,
Milan (22 Oct 2015 – 14 Feb 2016).
Photo Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the Artist.
Ryoji Ikeda, point of no return (2018). Eye Filmmuseum,
Amsterdam, December 2018. Photo Laura Rascaroli.
Runa Islam, Cabinet of Prototypes (2009–2010). Installation view. 16mm colour film, mute, vitrine, projection
materials and light filter. Duration: 7’. © Runa Islam.
Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby).
Tobias Putrih, Auditorium (2008) for CINEMATOG
RAPHY (2007–2008) by Runa Islam. Installation view
at Galleria Civica di Modena. Scaffolding, OSB plates,
16mm projector, screen. Dimensions: approx. 11 x 6
x 6m. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Gregor
Podnar, Berlin. Photographs by Paolo Terzi.
16
20
24
27
34
44
51
61
10
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
List of iLLustr ations
Runa Islam, Anatomical Study (Instruments) (2013).
Silver recouped from film processing. Ø1 15/16 x 2 3/4
in. (Ø5 x 7 cm). © Runa Islam. Photo © White Cube
(George Darrell).
Clemens von Wedemeyer, Remains, Deucalion and
Pyrrha (2013). Installation view The Cast. Photo: Matteo
Monti (MAXXI). Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris;
KOW, Berlin.
Nathaniel Mellors, Hippy Dialectics (2010). Photo: Steve
White. Courtesy of the artist, Matt’s Gallery, London,
and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
Cécile B. Evans, Sprung a leak (2016). Multi-channel
video, raspberry pis, cables, humanoid robots, robot
dog, custom fountain, privacy shades, lamps, dog
pen, bookshelf, assorted books, prints, miscellaneous
items, Solar vitamin bottles. 16:45 (looped). Installation
view, Cécile B. Evans, Tate Liverpool, 21 October 2016 –
19 March 2017.
Gibson + Recoder, Reduction Print (2014). 16mm
modified projector, 16mm film, reels, sculpting tool,
hardware, 27 x 35 x 12 inches. Still Film, March 24 –
May 28, 2016, Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles,
California. Photo: Rachel Hamburger.
Gibson + Recoder, Light Spill (2005). 16mm modified
projector, 16mm film, screen; dimensions variable.
Borderline Behaviour: Drawn Towards Animation,
January 25 – March 18, 2007, TENT, Rotterdam, The
Netherlands. Curated by Edwin Carels for International Film Festival Rotterdam. Photo: Roel Meelkop.
Gibson + Recoder, Atmos (2006). 16mm projector,
humidifier, glass crystal, hardware, dimensions variable. Transparency, November 14 – December 28, 2013,
Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado. Photo: Courtesy
of Robischon Gallery.
William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015).
Courtesy of William Kentridge Studio and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. © William Kentridge Studio.
William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015).
Courtesy of William Kentridge Studio and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. © William Kentridge Studio.
64
93
95
96
105
110
117
126
133
lisT oF illusTr ATions
Figure 18 William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015).
Courtesy of William Kentridge Studio and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. © William Kentridge Studio.
Figure 19 Douglas Gordon, Phantom (2011). © Studio lost but
found / DACS 2020 / Douglas Gordon / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn, 2018. Photo Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
Figure 20 Douglas Gordon, Phantom (2011). © Studio lost but
found / DACS 2020 / Douglas Gordon / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn, 2018. Photo Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
Figure 21 Douglas Gordon, Phantom (2011). © Studio lost but
found / DACS 2020 / Douglas Gordon / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn, 2018. Photo Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
Figure 22 Tacita Dean, Section Cinema, Homage to Marcel
Broodthaers (2002). 16mm film, colour with optical
sound. 13’, continuous loop. Courtesy of the artist, Frith
Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery,
New York/Paris.
Figure 23 Tacita Dean, Section Cinema, Homage to Marcel
Broodthaers (2002). 16mm film, colour with optical
sound. 13’, continuous loop. Courtesy of the artist, Frith
Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery,
New York/Paris.
Figure 24 Tacita Dean, Section Cinema, Homage to Marcel
Broodthaers (2002). 16mm film, colour with optical
sound. 13’, continuous loop. Courtesy of the artist, Frith
Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery,
New York/Paris.
Figure 25 Dulce Pinzón, Nostalgia (Historias del paraíso series,
2011–2012). Reproduced with permission of the artist.
Figure 26 Gustav Deutsch, Shirley, Visions of Reality (2013): a
tableau vivant diorama conspicuously framed around
figures immersed in solitary activities. Screenshot.
Figure 27 Ulrich Seidl, Safari (2016): adapting the dioramic
tableau to the genre of staged documentary. Screenshot. © Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion.
Figure 28 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Akron Civic, Ohio (1980), gelatin
silver print.
© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi.
Figure 29 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Michigan Theater, Detroit (2015),
gelatin silver print.
© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi.
11
136
145
145
153
159
159
168
177
187
190
197
208
12
List of iLLustr ations
Figure 30 Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water (2007). HD Video, 72’.
Courtesy of the Artist.
Figure 31 Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water (2007). HD Video, 72’.
Courtesy of the Artist.
Figure 32 David OReilly, screen shots from Everything (2017).
Courtest of the Artist.
Figure 33 Bill Anders’ ‘Earthrise’ (1968) as originally shot [top],
and as originally published and still typically reproduced [bottom].
Figure 34 Illustration depicting the framing of the earth within
Charles & Ray Eames’s 1968 A Rough Sketch… [top] and
their 1977 Powers of Ten [middle], with Leonardo da
Vinci’s 1490 Vitruvian Man [bottom].
Figure 35 The surface of the human hand at identical magnifications, as depicted in Kees Boeke’s 1957 Cosmic View
[left] and Charles & Ray Eames’s 1977 Powers of Ten
[right].
Figure 36 Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue (2013), (HD video, duration 13:46 min), installation view. 55th International
Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico
(The Encyclopedic Palace), curated by Massimiliano
Gioni, 1 June – 24 November 2013.
Figure 37 Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, (HD video, duration
13:46 min), installation view. 55th International Art
Exhibition, Venice, Italy, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The
Encyclopedic Palace), curated by Massimiliano Gioni,
1 June – 24 November 2013.
Figure 38 Kevin B. Lee, Transformers: The Premake (a desktop
documentary) (2014), <https://vimeo.com/94101046>,
screenshot.
Figure 39 Kevin B. Lee: Transformers: The Premake (a desktop
documentary) (2014), <https://vimeo.com/94101046>,
screenshot.
Figure 40 Installation view, Seth Price, Hostage Video Stills With
Time Stamps (2005). © Photo: Fabian Frinzel.
Figure 41 Installation view: foreground, Cory Arcangel, Data
Diaries (2003); background: Michel Majerus, DECODER
(1997). © Photo: Nicolas Wefers.
Figure 42 Installation view of works by Michel Majerus. From left
to right: Untitled (1996–2002); it does not really matter…
(1999); yet sometimes what is read successfully, stops us
with its meaning, no. II (1998). © Photo: Nicolas Wefers.
222
222
237
242
245
248
256
267
271
271
282
286
288
Acknowledgments
This edited collection is born of an idea, first shared and debated between us,
then with the authors we called upon to flesh it out and take it in unpredictable directions, and, finally, with the Commissioning Editor who decided
to bring the book to life. Each time, we were gratified by their enthusiastic
and generous responses. First of all, we would like to thank Maryse Elliot
at Amsterdam University Press for believing in this project and for her
encouragement throughout its gestation. We would also like to express
our gratitude to all the contributors for being such exceptional partners in
this venture, and for always being supportive, positive, and eager to help
in any way they could. We are most grateful to Sandra Gibson and Luis
Recoder for gracing us with their invaluable artists’ perspective and for
being more than generous with their time and interest. We are grateful to
the anonymous readers for their perceptive and productive comments. We
are also indebted to the galleries and artists who gave their permission to
use the images in the book.
A special thought goes to Thomas Elsaesser, who took on the book
proposal as editor of the Film Culture in Transition series, and whose work
has been a constant source of inspiration.
Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli
Cork, March 2020
Foreword: Courtesy of the Artists
Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder
Expanding cinema by means of theorizing film through contemporary art.
Expanding it, that is, by theorizing-film-through something other than film
itself and yet in affinity with it. The cinematic affinities in contemporary
art as the occasion through which theorizing film projects itself into an
expanding cinema that promises to become the theoretical apparatus par
excellence of a new dispositif for its expanding theory. In expanding cinema
through contemporary art the expanding theory preserves the legacy of
theorizing-film-through-film by other means. The ever-expanding dispositif
of theorizing-film-through-art reinstalls itself in the new installation, namely,
from the cinema to the gallery. The coming attraction, or rather distraction,
is no doubt the post-cinematic condition of possibility for its own projection
performance: theorizing contemporary art through film. Whether the dispositif
of theorizing-film-through-art takes hold of the dispositif of theorizing-artthrough-film as the uncanny shadow of its shadow is a possibility among
possibilities in the throw of the thematic scope outlined in the handsomely
edited volume before you. A retrospective foreword by way of a collection of
aphorisms in the form of artist statements, proposals, and correspondences
from our collaborative work as Gibson + Recoder registers the vertiginous twists
and turns of a threading path entangled in the light spill of an expanding
cinema: Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art.
I.
In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time.
Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in
light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply
imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theatre. To remove it
from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon
it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native
Murphy, J. and Rascaroli, L. (eds.), Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020
doi: 10.5117/9789462989467_fore
16
Sandr a GibSon + LuiS recoder
Figure 1 Gibson + recoder, Light Spill (2005). Modified 16mm film projector, film, screen,
dimensions variable. installation view, eye Filmmuseum, amsterdam, the netherlands, 2016.
Photo by Hans Wilschut.
darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness
and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift,
elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar
ForeWord: CourTesy oF THe ArTisTs
17
estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the
becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.1
II.
Our work employs the medium of film at the moment when film is no longer
the industrial standard of motion picture technology. Film is obsolete. But
if this is the case from an economic point of view, it has always been the
case from an artistic one. Artistic obsolescence in the medium of film is a
primordial fact that does not wait for the waning of its technological base;
film is obsolete at the moment of its birth. Film is fundamentally obsolete
in the same way that all art is obsolete at the moment of its birth. In the
realm of aesthetics, the emergence of beauty is utterly precarious, unstable,
decomposing before our very eyes. The economic view of obsolescence in
the medium of film is merely the vantage point through which to glimpse
the artistic view of obsolescence in its correct, even if belated, perspective.2
III.
To ask about cinema is not the same as asking about film. Cinema is the
metaphysical idea (of cinema) and not the phenomenological ‘thing itself’. It
is bereft of materiality in its escape into a dream-like immateriality. Cinema
is not film. It is the death of film (from the moment darkness settles in, the
materials disappear in the dark fabric of an abysmal masking device). Film
is not cinema. Film goes up against the grain (but it has no grain) of cinema.
It is the rotting flesh made up of bones and other corporal beasts lurking
in the dark, suspended in a murky substance. The organic nature of film is
the long intestine (umbilical/spinal cord) unwinding and slithering silently
behind our backs (our spines), wrapping its infinite coil (or noose?) ever
so swiftly around our necks! The death of film is not the death of cinema.
Disembodied/disembowelled from an apparent (though not transparent)
darkness, film is cut loose from its immaterial bond (its false disappearance,
its fake death) and made to roam the world for the first time. Film can do
without cinema once and for all. While cinema pretends to be continued…3
1
2
3
Gibson + Recoder, ‘Coming Attraction’.
Gibson + Recoder, ‘Cinematograph’.
Gibson + Recoder, ‘Cinema/Film’.
18
Sandr a GibSon + LuiS recoder
IV.
Film projection exceeds the limits of its concept as a mere functional apparatus for the mechanical performance of cinematic works. A concept
of ‘projection performance’ is, therefore, inherent to the medium which
performs not only the negation of its mediation and thus subordination to
the celluloid material, but also its resistance as a passive carrier. (Projection
projects its ambivalence to the material, intermittently hesitating between its
slavish animation of a dead object and its absolute indifference as to whether
the object is already dead or missing.) To perform the already performed is to
raise this element of resistance to a second-degree awareness. In light of this
awareness, the concept of projection performance becomes a tautological
concept in which ‘performance’ merely doubles and thus foregrounds the
specific functioning of the projective apparatus.
To work as an artist within a certain tautological understanding of
projection-as-performance is precisely to perform and reperform ad
infinitum the already performed. Film projection has always relied on a
projectionist to perform and reperform ad infinitum (ad nauseam) the already performed and preformed functioning of the projective apparatus. An
aesthetics of projection performance is an apprenticeship to this dedicated
custodian of darkness (of nothingness, of disappearance, of invisibility,
of transparency). To work or labour in utter darkness is one thing (i.e. to
make a bare something out of a bare nothing), but to shape and reshape the
intermittent im/palpability of this void through the tyranny of cinematic
time is another thing, one which incessantly haunts in its stubborn resistance
to the resistance. To break free from this temporal tyranny of narrativized
time, or at least to slip beneath its gaze, a shift in the projective location
presents itself as a possible exit, though by no means an escape. 4
V.
We work with projection and this is a very material, object-based practice;
but in our projection performances, more than in the installations, we are
interested in framing a certain dialectical slippage between materiality and
immateriality. We imagine the viewer being completely lost in the illusion
of the screen events, almost forgetting the live aspect of the experience. The
4 Gibson + Recoder, ‘Projecting Projection’. Based on a lecture presentation delivered at the
Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans, 10–13 March 2011.
ForeWord: CourTesy oF THe ArTisTs
19
slippage between being a live, non-reproducible, event and a reproducible
event occurs also because of the durational nature of the work and its
illusive character. We are interested in foregrounding radical materiality,
exaggerating it to the point where, paradoxically, it is no longer the material
itself that is experienced but pure light, sheer illusion, absolute immateriality,
or what have you.
There is a difference between working materially in a gallery, where the
approach tends to be literal, the object is there, and in a theatrical space,
where the tendency is to withdraw from materiality, simply because the
cinema space is so overloaded with a kind of illusory forgetfulness of the
material conditions. The architectural contributes to this effect. As much as
you try to pry into it, call attention to it, unmask it, and expose it for what
it is, the cinema is resiliently stubborn and rebels against transparency.
We like to think of the footage as just another element in the ensemble
that constitutes the apparatus. Our apparent ambivalence with the footage
is not unlike any other element in this multiplicity known as the cinematograph. The footage as a found object is no more special than the found object
of the cinema machine itself. We are working with the totality.
Film projectors are not meant to be running all day, as they overheat
and break down, and so we discovered that minimally chiselling away at
some key components allows for an uninterrupted, continuous exhibition of
something that wasn’t designed to be presented in this manner. In general,
any kind of intervention we do with the projector has to do with the sheer
impossibility of the cinematograph to project non-stop 24-hours and seven
days a week, unlike a static object such as a painting or a photograph. And
that comes from the fact that the machine resists that kind of viewing
situation, and also resists being viewed as a machine – it’s got to be tucked
away in a hidden chamber so as to keep from view the medium’s utter
fragility and precariousness.
Whenever we exhibit Light Spill, someone always asks: ‘What do you
do with the film pile afterwards? Do you rewind it?’ – and so the idea of
Threadbare came from the act of rewinding the film back onto the projector, but in such a way where the return of the material is so vast that it
overwhelms the take-up mechanism to the point of rendering the entire
machine inoperable. Perhaps it is a form of mummification. Some say it
resembles the signature silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head.
We have two different practices which are in conversation with one
another. In order for us to express something essential about the projection
performances, it is imperative that it be achieved in displaced form, outside
the dark chamber. The open space of a gallery allows us to express a kind of
20
sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
Figure 2 Gibson + recoder, Threadbare (2013). 16mm film projector, reels, film, 27 x 35 x 12 inches.
Courtesy of Gibson + recoder studio, brooklyn, ny, 2013. Photo by rachel Hamburger.
materiality that is not allowable even in the most material gestures of our
performances in the closed space of the cinema. Open and closed spaces
work together, the one expressing what the other cannot articulate.
Much of our sculptural work attempts to frame a certain paradox of the
still life of motion picture phenomena. What we have achieved with this
work is extremely cinema- or even film-specific, even more so than in the
cinema space proper, which again rebels against its transparency.5
VI.
What is the status of an artwork when nobody is in the gallery? What is
the status of an artwork outside the gallery’s exhibition hours? What is the
status of an artwork that requires light once it is no longer illuminated?
What is the status of an artwork that runs on electricity once the power is
shut off? What is the status of an artwork that has been destroyed or gone
missing? What is the status of an artwork when the viewer is blocked from
experiencing the thing itself? What is the status of an artwork as a concept
5
Excerpts from an interview conducted by Tommaso Isabella.
ForeWord: CourTesy oF THe ArTisTs
21
without an object? What is the status of an artwork amidst the scrutiny of
questions concerning the inaccessibility of the artwork?
Artworks that run on electricity and are intermittently turned on and
off in compliance with a museum or gallery’s exhibition schedule seem
to beg the question whether their status as artworks undergoes a certain
disequilibrium in the constitution of their spatiotemporal currency. Can you
imagine that the artificial light works of major artists such as Dan Flavin,
Keith Sonnier, and Jenny Holzer are switched on and off, day in and day out,
to comply with museum exhibition hours worldwide? Can you imagine a
permanent installation of fluorescent or neon-light works at a prestigious art
foundation flickering in and out due to a power surge or blackout? Can you
imagine a light blowing out and a technician attending to the ‘problem’ while
viewers eagerly wait for the incandescent resuscitation of the artwork? Or
the more common practice of posting signage indicating that the artwork is
temporarily ‘out of order’? Can you imagine a famous painting, say Da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa or Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (aka Mona Lisa with a Moustache), with
signage indicating that the artwork is temporarily ‘out of order’? Perhaps the
closest one may get to witnessing such an unlikely, not to mention absurd,
scenario is when curatorial practice insists on displaying an empty frame
indicating a missing painting that was allegedly the target of an art heist.
The uncanny framing of invisible canvases by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and
Manet at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comes to mind.
Again, what is the status of an artwork when it is not altogether there or
absent, when the power flickers out or the viewer is blocked from experiencing the thing itself?6
VII.
STILL: NOT OR HARDLY MOVING; AN ORDINARY STATIC PHOTOGRAPH
(AS OPPOSED TO A MOTION PICTURE); WITHOUT MOVING (STAND
STILL); EVEN NOW OR AT A PARTICULAR TIME (THEY STILL DID NOT
UNDERSTAND); NEVERTHELESS; EVEN; YET; INCREASINGLY (STILL
GREATER EFFORT); MAKE OR BECOME STILL; STILLNESS; STILL LIFE.
STALL: THE STALLING OF AN ENGINE (THE CONDITION RESULTING
FROM THIS); REACH A CONDITION WHERE THE SPEED IS TOO LOW TO
ALLOW EFFECTIVE OPERATION OF THE CONTROLS; CAUSE (ENGINE) TO
STALL; PLAY FOR TIME WHEN BEING QUESTIONED; DELAY; OBSTRUCT.
6
Gibson + Recoder, ‘Electric Shadows’.
22
sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
STILL STALL: REACHING A CONDITION WHERE THE SPEED IS TOO LOW
TO ALLOW EFFECTIVE OPERATION OF THE CONTROLS, CAUSING THE
ENGINE TO STALL SO AS TO NOT OR HARDLY MOVE. THE CAUSALITY
AND CASUALTY OF A STAND STILL. AN ORDINARY STATIC STILLNESS
AS OPPOSED TO A MOTION STALLING. NEVERTHELESS, AND WITH
INCREASINGLY AND STILL GREATER EFFORT, A HARDLY MOVING AND
YET EFFECTIVE OPERATION IN OPPOSITION TO A MOTION PICTURE. TO
DELAY EVEN NOW OR AT A PARTICULAR TIME A WITHOUT MOVING
PLAY FOR TIME OBSTRUCTING THE OPPOSITION.7
VIII.
FILM IS…NOT FILM. IT IS EVERYTHING THAT IS WHEN REDUCED TO THE
SHEER NOTHINGNESS OF NOTHING BUT FILM. WHEN YOU ARE LEFT
WITH NOTHING BUT FILM OR WHEN IT LEAVES YOU WITH NOTHING
BUT (WHAT) REMAINS, IN THE UTTER NOTHINGNESS OF NOTHING YOU
REACH INTO THE IMPALPABLE VOID. CALL IT THE IMMATERIALITY
OF THE MATERIAL EXCESS OR WHAT HAVE YOU, FILM IS NOTHING
AS IT NEVER (EVER) WAS ANYTHING TO BEGIN WITH BUT THE NEARNESS – BARELY THE PRESENCE – OF SHEER NOTHINGNESS. ALMOST
NOTHING. CONSIDER THE INTERMITTENT FACTUM BRUTUM THAT
FILM IS AND IS NOT. MORE SPECIFICALLY, IS ONLY VIS-À-VIS ITS NOT.
THE IS IS NOT WHAT IS MOST INTRIGUING BUT WHAT IT OBSTRUCTS,
NAMELY THE NOT. OUR STUBBORN CLINGING TO THINGNESS STIFLES
THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY CRITICAL AND ENGAGING CONFRONTATION
WITH THE IMPALPABLE NOTHING. THE MORE FILM REACHES INTO THE
VOID OF ITS ESSENTIALIST NULLITY THE MORE IT TRANSCENDS AND
SHATTERS ITS APPARENT THINGNESS. FILM IS…NOT FILM. IT IS THE
ENTRY AND EXIT POINT OF A MOVEMENT IN AND THROUGH WHICH
FILM IS IMMANENTLY NOTHING BUT ITSELF BUT ONLY IN APPEARANCE AS ITS REAL MOTIVE IS TO OVERREACH AND THUS OVERCOME
ITS PURPORTED LIMITS IN A CONCENTRATED EFFORT TO SURPASS
ITSELF IN ITS SELF-EFFACING AUTO-DESTRUCTION. IT IS IN THE WAKE
OF THIS IMMANENT CRISIS THAT FILM IS…NOT FILM. A FILM WHICH
ASPIRES TO REFLECT NOTHING BUT ITSELF IS A NARCISSISTIC MIRROR
WHICH SHATTERS WHEN THE REFLECTION AND THE THING WHICH IT
REFLECTS COME HEAD TO HEAD. FILM IS…NOT FILM. IF EVERYTHING
7
Gibson + Recoder, ‘STILL FILM / STILL LIFE’.
ForeWord: CourTesy oF THe ArTisTs
23
IN FILM IS SO GEARED, IS SO EQUIPPED, SO AS TO RESTRICT THE VIEW
OF ITS THINGNESS THEN WE SHALL FURTHER RESTRICT THE RESTRICTION SO AS TO MAKE IT OUR CONSTRICTING VIEW. BY RADICALIZING
THE IMMATERIAL PREMISE OF THE MATERIAL APPARATUS PERHAPS
WE CAN BETTER ARRIVE AT THE UNCANNY TRUTH NOT ONLY OF
THIS ANTIQUARIAN APPURTENANCE THAT WE CANNOT SO EASILY
SHAKE OFF (EVEN WHEN WE SO DESPERATELY TRY) BUT OF AN ENTIRE
EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISPOSITIF. FILM IS NOT NOTHING. (FOR THAT
WOULD BE AN UTTERLY NULL THING TO SAY.) FILM IS THE NOTHING
PURE AND SIMPLE (WHICH, WE MIGHT ADD, IS THE MOST DIFFICULT
THING TO ACHIEVE) – WHAT WE ARE CALLING HERE THE NOT FILM, I.E.
THE NOT FILM IN THE RESTRICTED SENSE THAT IT IS SHOT THROUGH
AND PERMEATED WITH THE EPOCHAL (ESSENTIALIST) FILM IS… FILM
IS (NOT FILM) IS (NOT) WHAT REMAINS AS ITS THINGNESS FADES INTO
DARKNESS. WHAT REMAINS GLIMMERS IN THE NIGHT. IS THERE AND
NOT THERE. (FILM APPROACHES ITS NULLITY.) THE FILM SLOWLY
FADING INTO THE OPAQUE NIGHT PUNCTURED BY A STARRY SKY IS THE
SLOWEST FILM IN THE WORLD SHEDDING ITS LINGERING LIGHT ON
NOTHING BUT THE APOCALYPTIC (THOUGH BY NO MEANS NIHILISTIC)
COMING OF THE PROFOUNDEST NOTHING. ONLY THROUGH THE VEILS
OF FILM CAN WE PEER OUT OF FILM IN A COMPREHENSIVE PEERING
ALL THE WAY THROUGH FILM TO FILM’S VERY END, NEVER FULLY
ESCAPING FILM BUT ALSO (AND THIS IS WHAT IS MOST PROMISING)
NEVER EVER FULLY TAKEN IN BY FILM EITHER.8
IX.
Motion picture projection and theatre presentation manuals describe an
optical aberration that produces unwanted effects of stray light on the screen.
What is striking, at least for us, is the industry’s insistence in referring to
such effects as non-image formations. In one sense they are non-images,
if they interfere with the official motion picture of a feature presentation;
and yet, in another sense, they are images precisely because they interfere,
i.e. images of non-images. Incident Light insists on the indecent exposure
of the non-image to stray forth and come to light.9
8 Gibson + Recoder, ‘FILM IS…NOT FILM’.
9 Unrealized project proposal titled ‘Incident Light’ for Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY,
2016.
24
sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
Figure 3 Gibson + recoder, Illuminatoria (2016). Hand-blown glass, rheostat motors, lighting kit,
lucite, hardware, 114 x 80 inches. installation view, exploratorium, san Francisco, CA, 2016. Photo
by Gayle laird.
ForeWord: CourTesy oF THe ArTisTs
25
X.
‘The function of the motion-picture screen is to display a world of fantasy
and entertainment without the screen being obvious.’10
The point of departure for this premiere performance is the obliteration,
literally the blotting out, of the cinematic object of projection. Projection
performance as the art par excellence of obstructing, concealing, masking
absolutely nothing but itself. Obliteration: in which the spectacle of the
apparatus is to be screened, or better screened out, in the negative relief
of a self-cancellation vis-à-vis nothing but the disciplinary application of
a cinematic standard.11
XI.
An ‘empty frame’ in negative – elements for a collaboration.
What if we loosely structure our collaboration around the idea or concept
of a screening space photographed with a large format camera, but limiting
ourselves to taking the negative as the thing itself? It is irrelevant whether
the film we are projecting is Snow White or the white light of the film projector. If the former, then an exposure long enough to overexpose the screen
but not the screening space is necessary. If exposed properly, our negative
depicts a black rectangular screen against a white screening space.
This negative image is the first stage in developing our latent image of
the cinematograph. Our collaboration will devise different ways in which
this latent image can be further developed.
A couple of years ago we developed a proposal for a performance titled
Incident Light. No film and no film projector involved but a pair of high-end
studio spotlights with manual aperture and dimming functions. Aside
from this, we are currently contemplating an ambitious project that takes
the same negative (of the cinema) and blows it up to a life-size walk-in
movie theatre. It partially answers your curiosity in light of the flicker and
on/off in which you observe the following: ‘As if Sugimoto’s camera could
have made a composite temporal image JUST of all the BLACK spaces in
between frames.’12 We have the beginning of an answer to precisely this
area of inquiry in the black-and-white photographic negative that frames a
10 Kloepfel, p. 88.
11 Gibson + Recoder, ‘Obliteration’.
12 Walley, Email.
26
sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
homogenous black rectangle suspended in the blinding light of the theatre.
Now imagine if we take this photographic negative and blow it up to an
actual life-size walk-in movie theatre.
Sugimoto’s yet-to-be photographed negative of Kubelka’s Invisible
Cinema?
The construction of such a light/dark space, ideally a re-gutted abandoned
cinema, would be to fabricate a large-scale recessed black rectangle so that
the black hovers indeterminately between flatness and depth, surface and
void. The illumination of the theatre’s interior would of course have to be as
bright white as possible, somehow flooded like a studio ‘cyc’ (which apparently derives from ‘cyclorama’). The hollowed-out interior of the recessed
rectangle to be treated with a non-reflective black matte.
Our proposal for a negative cinema can perhaps hook up to your proposal
for an ‘infernal machine’ – a model for the conceptual apparatus ‘designed to
unveil as many levels of intermittency as possible’.13 Actually, we conceived
the technique of the camera obscura in Obscurus Projectum as the prototype
for the possibility of an ‘intermittentless’ cinema in which the negated
intermittencies (i.e. Baudry) can be critically contemplated and perhaps
even reintroduced, beginning with the intermittent nature of the viewer
navigating within the viewing space itself, literally breaking in and out of
space so as to rupture the cinematic continuum. (Our more recent work in
Chicago, The Changeover System, is perhaps as ‘infernal’ as it gets for us with
two movie theatres, a sound artist, dancers, and an audience in constant
flux). Your concise and yet poignant Exploratorium essay introduced the
figure of breaking- or tearing-apart and wanting to know what is inside,
and that this is precisely what the ‘digital’ prohibits while the ‘analogue’
facilitates.14 The camera obscura is already a ‘broken’ apparatus in the sense
that there is a light leak in the architecture of darkness – and this is where
the ‘cameraless’ work of Available Light gets its bearings.
So the parameters of the collaboration would be to contemplate in an
infernal machine such as the one proposed in the negative of cinema not
only a vast collection of subsumed intermittencies, but also a working model
for the development of a new body of work existing nowhere but on paper.15
13 Ibid.
14 Walley, ‘Obscurus Projectum’.
15 Unrealized project proposal in collaboration with Jonathan Walley titled ‘Infernal Machine:
The Negative of Cinema’.
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27
Figure 4 Gibson + recoder, The Changeover System (2017). Two screening rooms, two multi-reel
feature-length 35mm films, four 35mm film projectors, hand-blown glass, rheostat motors,
hardware, variable duration. dance choreography by douglas dunn. sound composition by brian
Case. Performance view, Gene siskel Film Center, Chicago, il, 2017.
Courtesy of Conversations At The edge & school of the Art institute of Chicago.
Photo by Connor Fenwick.
XII.
Conceptual Specificities
The project (if we can call it that) is to question the ‘expanded’ cinematic
forms that argue in favour of a certain crisis and perhaps overcoming in
the concept of medium specificity. What we desire is nothing more, and
nothing less, than to inhabit the concept of medium specificity as if it had
never been inhabited before. With our closed-in systems, we imagine that
the conceptual–structural integrity of the whole is a simple looping device
or mechanism that is by no means merely repetitive and boring but precisely
repetitive and boring. In brief, the concept of medium specificity, when
specifying its concept, is a performative contradiction that keeps looping
back upon the impossible impasse of its symptomatic aporia as it infinitely
approaches the closure of an inexhaustible exhaustion.
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sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
Change-Over System
To perform the ‘changeover’ system in the 35mm theatrical projection of
celluloid film is to disclose a performative contradiction that is embedded in
the cinematic organization of the materials themselves. What is simultaneously projected and thus superimposed in a kind of double-projection is
the intermittent play of cinematic illusion and disillusion. However, the
maintenance of this material–immaterial dialectic (perhaps embodied
in the f igure of the projectionist) quickly transpires in the dissolving
forgetfulness of an audio-visual seduction. As there is absolutely nothing
to ‘grasp’ or ‘grip’ in the conceptual void of an ambiguous theatrical effect,
the viewer is automatically rendered helpless to the coming attraction of
an enigmatic abduction. An enigma, moreover, whose radical absence is
the mere formulaic precondition of an imaginary presence barely hanging
on the threads of light and sound waves unthinkable outside the narrow
spectrum of a certain projective anthropomorphism. The cinematic effect
that discloses the shock of an utterly indigenous heterogeneity entangled in
the projective thread is no contradiction at all, but the phantasmagorical
persistence of an infernal material–immaterial dialectical machine.
Dark Chamber Disclosure
Dark chamber disclosure performs the concealed contradiction of the
cinematic apparatus within the apparatus itself. For it cannot be pried
open, teased out, or unveiled in any other fashion. The contradiction resists
its representability in a spectacle-within-a-spectacle, as in meta-cinema’s
catastrophic attempts at medium-specific self-reflexivity, but must be
performed within a site-specific domain that is itself the very medium of a
fundamental performativity always-already performed. The living agency
of medium-specific performative contradictions is merely the obtrusive
materiality of a subject slipping into the cinematic caesuras to perform
a medium stripped bare to nothing but the specificity of itself which is,
paradoxically, everything but specific.16
16 Gibson + Recoder, ‘Performative Contradictions’. Based on a lecture presentation for the
‘Expanding Cinema: Spatial Dimensions of Film Exhibition, Aesthetics, and Theory’ Conference,
Yale University, New Haven, CT, 15 – 16 February 2013.
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29
XIII.
The main subject matter of our work addresses the materials and ideas
of projection. Our current fascination with the camera obscura has to do
with reimagining and recasting this ‘bare’ technological apparatus as the
earliest, if not the first, projection of the world, or simply world projection.17
XIV.
The Matter with Film is a play on the condition of film-as-matter and its
matter-of-factness in the face of emerging technologies. What’s the matter
with film anyway? Why does it matter? As a matter-of-fact film matters.
How? It matters as soon as the maker takes the material at hand. In this
meeting between film-as-matter and hand something is grasped. Grasped
into matter. In the grasping of matter the latter grasps the hand in return,
slaps back, so to speak. Back-and-forth. The objectification of film as matter
and the matter of objectifying go hand in hand, catch one another. The
Matter with Film is a catchy title for a curious game we play with a bit of
matter. Once handed, we can matter-the-matter so that it matters. For all
the films in this program matter in the face of what does not matter, that
is, of that which immatters and relentlessly chatters.18
XV.
Ride the Light is a programme of live events for the multiplicity of film projection. The doubling, tripling, and sometimes quadrupling up of screens – in
short, the dispersal of cinema – fragments the always-already fragmented,
and in essence redistributes the temporal distribution of temporality. The
doubling-up of the mechanical-spectacular releases our time machine from the
bond of a manufactured ‘ticking-away’. The sequential beat of the framework
(of frame-upon-frame) is followed by its doppelganger to be reproduced not
as reproduction of the same thing but as re-production of the dissimilar in
simulation. When twos, threes, and fours converge there emerges a ricochet, a
17 Mad. Sq. Art, ‘Artist Interview: Gibson & Recoder’. Interview conducted on the occasion
of solo exhibition, Topsy-Turvy: A Camera Obscura Installation, Mad. Sq. Art, New York, NY,
1 March – 7 April 2013.
18 Artist statement titled ‘The Matter with Film’ for a touring film screening series in 2003.
30
sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
shimmer, a ghost. It is this ghosting that cinema pursues with its ‘persistence of
vision’ only to erase it from vision by thickening the still succession framework
in what is called eidetics. Ride the Light broadens the network of streaks, raises
the erasures, re-visions for cinema its indigenous persist-stance.19
XVI.
If our experience of film history is generally thought of in terms of fleeting
images on a blank screen in a dark room then how are they to be displayed,
exhibited, screened in the overexposed rooms of a museum gallery? How is
this unprecedented temporal specificity to be remembered? Or do these immaterial effigies caught in the flow of time utterly rebel against their display?
Given this conundrum our working title for Headlands [Center for the Arts],
Film Museum, might appear somewhat counterintuitive, nay impossible.
But is there not an exit strategy somewhere beyond the EXIT sign, in the
lobby, in the little chamber above and behind the spectator’s head where
projection casts a flickering of light and shadow? Questioning along these
lines slows down the filmic flow, freeze-frames a tableau imbued with time
and movement, brings it closer to painterly and sculptural phenomena.20
Bibliography
Gibson, Sandra, and Luis Recoder, ‘Cinema/Film’, World Picture, 2 (Autumn 2008)
<http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_2/Gibson_Recoder.html> [accessed
20 January 2019].
––––– ‘Cinematograph’, artist statement for solo exhibition, Gibson + Recoder:
Cinematograph, Craddock-Terry Gallery, Lynchburg, VA, 6 January – 19 February 2012. Published in Nina Jukić, Gabriele Jutz, and Edgar Lissel, ‘RESET THE
APPARATUS! Reconfiguring the Photographic and the Cinematic’, EIKON, 97
(2017), 52–53.
––––– ‘Coming Attraction’, artist statement for solo exhibition, Gibson + Recoder:
Light Spill, Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, 27 October – 29 December 2007.
Published in Celluloid: Tacita Dean, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Rosa
Barba, Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder, ed. by Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap
Guldemond (Rotterdam: EYE Filmmuseum/NAI010 Publishers, 2016), p. 114.
19 Gibson + Recoder, ‘Ride the Light’.
20 Gibson + Recoder, ‘Film Museum’.
ForeWord: CourTesy oF THe ArTisTs
31
––––– ‘Electric Shadows’, artist statement for solo exhibition, Gibson + Recoder:
Electric Shadows, Milton Art Bank, Milton, PA, 11 August – 7 October 2017 <https://
miltonartbank.com/electric-shadows/> [accessed 20 January 2019].
––––– ‘FILM IS…NOT FILM’, INCITE!, 2 (Spring 2010), 108 <http://www.incite-online.
net/gibson-recoder2.html> [accessed 20 January, 2019].
––––– ‘Film Museum’, application proposal for Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, 2015 <http://www.headlands.org/artist/sandra-gibson-luis-recoder>
[accessed 20 January 2019].
––––– ‘Infernal Machine: The Negative of Cinema’, unrealized project proposal in
collaboration with Jonathan Walley (Email to Walley, 15 February, 2018).
––––– ‘Obliteration’, artist statement for keynote projection performance, World
Picture Conference, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, 7 – 8 November 2014
<https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/obliteration/> [accessed 20 January 2019].
––––– ‘Performative Contradictions’, Millennium Film Journal, 56 (Fall 2012), 58–59.
––––– ‘Projecting Projection’, Millennium Film Journal, 56 (Fall 2012), 60–61.
––––– ‘Ride the Light’, artist statement for projection performance, Expanded
Cinema: Film als Spektakel, Ereignis und Performance, curated by Mark Webber,
HMKV, Dortmund, 10–26 September 2004.
––––– ‘STILL FILM / STILL LIFE’, artist statement for solo exhibition, Gibson + Recoder: Still Film, Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles, 24 March–28 May 2016 <https://
www.youngprojectsgallery.com/gibson-recoder> [accessed 20 January 2019].
Gibson, Sandra, Luis Recoder, and Jonathan Walley, ‘Toward a Conceptual Remapping of the Cinematic: Exit the Cinema in Order to Fold it Back on Itself’, in RESET
THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary
Art, ed. by Edgar Lissel, Gabriele Jutz, and Nina Jukić (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019),
pp. 61–75.
Isabella, Tommaso, ‘Stations of Light’, FILMIDEE, 11 (22 July 2014), <https://www.
filmidee.it/2014/07/stations-of-light> [accessed 20 January 2019].
Kloepfel, Don V., ed., Motion-Picture Projection and Theatre Presentation Manual (New York: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, 1969).
Mad. Sq. Art, ‘Artist Interview: Gibson & Recoder’, 22 March 2013 <https://www.
madisonsquarepark.org/mad-sq-art/artist-interview-gibson-recoder> [accessed
20 January 2019].
Walley, Jonathan, ‘Obscurus Projectum’, in Gibson + Recoder: Powers of Resolution,
Cinema Arts Essays, 1 (2016), Exploratorium, San Francisco, <https://www.
exploratorium.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/PowersofResolutionCinemaArtsEssay1.pdf> [accessed 20 January 2019].
32
sAndr A Gibson + luis reCoder
About the Authors
Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder have been exhibiting their expanded cinema
installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the
permanent collections of major museums, including the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los
Angeles, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. Awards and commissions
include The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency, National
Endowment for the Art’s U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Mad.
Sq. Art. They are currently featured artists and research associates of RESET
THE APPARATUS! hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria.
Gibson + Recoder live and work in New York. www.gibsonrecoder.com
Introduction: On Cinema Expanding
Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli
This book is born of a visit to an exhibition. We saw Philippe Parreno’s
Hypothesis at the Pirelli HangarBicocca of Milan in December 2015.1 A complex, anthological ‘choreography’ including many works and collaborations
by the artist, Hypothesis is a deeply cinematic work. The term cinematic,
albeit frequently used, requires qualification. While recognizing that it
is resistant to definition, Maeve Connolly has explored a range of ways
in which it has been used by critics to discuss art that has to do with the
activities, materialities, and processes of filmmaking, while being ‘located
outside or beyond cinema’.2 In line with this definition, although including a
number of films and videos, the cinematicity of Parreno’s Hypothesis exists
outside and beyond them (and even above them, given that much in his
exhibition happens at hangar-ceiling height). But what is significant about
our experience of Parreno’s exhibition, and generated the reflection at the
root of this volume, is that Hypothesis struck us as a cinematic artwork that
is theoretical. That is, a work that is not only associated with, and draws on,
the cinema as imagery, medium, and cultural referent, but one that functions
as a theory of it. The whole set up, indeed, powerfully spoke to us not only
through, but also of the cinema – seen as a specific, historicized experience,
as a constructed space, a set of cultural meanings, and an apparatus. Ideas
of film technology, projection, reproduction, spectatorship, narrativity,
temporality, historicity, and myth all came to us as if in waves while we
explored the vast expanse of the gallery, formerly an industrial hangar.
Concrete objects of the cinema (spotlights, marquees, sets, rails, screens,
projectors) as well as immaterial ones (the play of light and shadows, the
identifications, the mythology) were at the basis of this effect, while not
exhausting it.
1 Hypothesis was Parreno’s first anthological Italian exhibition and was held at the Pirelli
HangarBicocca between 22 October 2015 and 14 February 2016.
2 Connolly, p. 85
Murphy, J. and Rascaroli, L. (eds.), Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020
doi: 10.5117/9789462989467_intro
34
Jill Murphy and l aur a r ascaroli
Figure 5 philippe parreno, Hypothesis, hangarBicocca, Milan (22 october 2015 – 14 February 2016).
photo andrea rossetti. courtesy of the artist.
It is of course possible to identify the cinema as an inspiration behind discrete
works in Hypothesis. The rather overpowering installation Danny the Street
(2006–2015), for instance, is composed of nineteen differently shaped and sized
marquees – sculptures in Plexiglas and lightbulbs which, positioned at different heights, form an imaginary, almost sentient avenue under which the visitor
walks. Inspired by the marquees common in 1950s America to publicize films,
the lights intermittently switch on and off according to the tempo of a powerful
score conceived by Parreno and Nicholas Becker together with a number of
musicians, and played automatically by two pianos controlled by a master
keyboard.3 The marquees not only design a street of the cinema, and beckon
to the visitor gesturing to the promise of a marvellous (cinematographic)
spectacle to be discovered, but are the spectacle in themselves, independently
of the films they are supposed to, but do not, advertise. As such, they represent
the activity of cinema-going as the true experience of the twentieth century.
Another Day with Another Sun (2014), then, realized in collaboration with
Liam Gillick, is composed of a cinema spotlight that, travelling along rails
suspended from the ceiling, hits the structures and columns of the gallery,
projecting an ever-changing game of shadows on the wall, as on to a huge
3 Artists and musicians included Agoria, Thomas Bartlett, Liam Gillick, Ranjana Leyendecker,
Mirwais, and Robert AA Lowe.
introduc tion: on cineMa expanding
35
white screen. Drawn by the marquees into the spectacle of the cinema, thus,
the visitor steps inside Plato’s Cave, and admires a pre-cinema spectacle of
shadows reminiscent of an ephemeral, and filmic, urban skyline. Of the films
by Parreno that the visitor can pause and watch on the screens, which are part
of the exhibition, Marilyn (2012) is particularly emblematic for its reflection
on the cinema as a construction founded on the stars, on mythologies, and
on the illusions of representation, mise en scène, and technology. The images
in this video are presented as subjective shots of Marilyn Monroe, whom we
hear talking, and whose hand we see writing. The setting is the meticulously
reconstructed suite of the Hotel Waldorf Astoria in New York where the diva
stayed during the 1950s. The atmosphere becomes progressively haunting, as
a sense of confinement and loneliness is evoked by the restricted view, the
persistent ringing of an unanswered telephone, and the sound of rainfall
striking the window. Eventually, the camera pans backward, revealing the
machinery that created the illusion of Marilyn’s presence (her voice was
reproduced by an algorithm, her handwriting by a purpose-built robot, her
gaze by the camera), and the room to be nothing more than a film set.
While many individual pieces in Hypothesis are profoundly cinematic in
themselves, they are not experienced by viewers individually; rather, they are
organized in sequences which form non-linear narratives – a loose and yet organized structure. Visitors walk around beckoned by events of light and shadow,
bursts of sound and music, which, like powerful son et lumière performances,
suddenly grab their attention, drawing them in, only to release them again.
Waves of emotional and contemplative engagement push the visitors through
the invisible routes of the exhibition, eliciting different degrees of intensity and
participation. It is the exhibition as a whole, then, that by curating the works in
space, by creating a montage and a sequence, comes across as a theory of the
cinema. Hypothesis explores the themes investigated by Parreno’s individual
works – including presence and absence, reality and simulation, mediation
and the uncertain confine between illusion and perception – as a product of
the cinema, seen as a specific cultural, technological, and ideological construct
that has profoundly, irrevocably shaped our consciousness. Inspired by Parreno’s Hypothesis, the present volume, Theorizing Film Through Contemporary
Art: Expanding Cinema, stems from the observation that contemporary art
continues to incorporate, restage and re-present fundamental elements of
the cinematic medium and that, in so doing, such artworks raise probing
theoretical questions on the ontology of the cinema – which they can now
contemplate from the vantage point of a post-medium location.
In commenting on the convergence of the cinema and the museum
that has become increasingly evident and significant in contemporary art,
36
Jill Murphy and l aur a r ascaroli
Giuliana Bruno has observed that this convergence was in truth established
very early on, and indeed characterized the prehistory and birth of the
cinematic medium. She writes:
It is important to remember that there was an actual history of ‘installations’ that took place at the very origin of film. The convergence of cinema
and the museum that was established at the dawn of modernity is rooted
in the birth of the medium. Today’s artists appear to be winking at this
very historic moment out of which cinema was born. 4
For Bruno, the forms of projection of post-cinematic art (with specific
reference to installation art) reconnect with, and repeat, the ‘exhibitionary
fantasies that emerged at the time of precinema, […] the culture of exhibition and the art of projection of early modernity’.5 Thus, concludes Bruno,
artists today, ‘[i]n some ways, are becoming historians’.6 This collection, by
focusing on how through their work contemporary artists reproduce, test,
and investigate the components of the cinema as an apparatus and a specific
form of experience, is equally and even more interested in how artists are
becoming film theorists. The conceptual movement this book produces,
accordingly, takes its point of departure from the encounter with a specific
art object, and tracks back to the cinema, in an effort to (re)theorize film
through the lens of contemporary art.
The title of the volume alludes to the expanded cinema framework, but
our project differentiates itself from that debate by proposing a distinct take.
Since its introduction in the 1970s, the term expanded cinema has gained much
currency, while remaining a rather vague concept. Gene Youngblood’s famous
definition legitimized this ambiguity, by proposing that expanded cinema is
not ‘a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical
drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes’.7
Accordingly, the term has been applied to a rather diverse range of artistic
experiences. Jackie Hatfield’s useful definition synthesizes for us the prevailing
sense of this complex phenomenon to be found in the critical literature:
Not without ambiguities, expanded cinema as a term generally describes
synaesthetic cinematic spectacle (spectacle meaning exhibition, rather
4
5
6
7
Bruno, p. 27.
Bruno, p. 29.
Bruno, p. 27.
Youngblood, p. 41.
introduc tion: on cineMa expanding
37
than simply an issue of projection or scale), whereby the notions of conventional filmic language (for example dramaturgy, narrative, structure,
technology) are either extended or interrogated outside the single-screen
space.8
While this field is relevant to our project, the significance of artists’ film
to the relationship between cinema and contemporary art has been widely
documented, and, as such, exceeds the scope of our inquiry. Key contributions like Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art by Erika Balsom, for
instance, among others, have used film theory to analyze contemporary
moving-image-based art, and have eloquently examined the ramifications
of the fact that film is no longer confined to the cinema theatre and the
home, but has extended to the art gallery and the museum (and far beyond
them, as demonstrated by Francesco Casetti). Although acknowledging and
drawing on this important work, our collection seeks to go in a different
direction and examine what the artworks say about film theory, rather than
what film theory says about contemporary moving-image-based art. Our
investigation is not so much motivated by understanding what happens
to cinema in the art gallery as by engaging with artwork that explores the
apparatus, the cinema space, the film set, the projected image, or cinematic
performance – in short, the objects of cinema and their aesthetic, technical,
experiential, material, and ideological coordinates.
At the core of the artworks considered in this project is an effort to
understand both the experience of the cinema within the material and
the experience of the material within the projected image. The relationship between cinematic and real space is defining in this respect. The
contributions in this book focus on artworks that have a strong material
presence and tend to coexist with the viewer in a shared space. This sense
of materiality is also conferred upon the object or actor within the image
and even on the frame of the image or the sound in an artwork. Unpacking
the cinematic object in this deliberate way opens out from the moving
image to a mediation of the world as told by the narrative structures of film,
as presented through its technical structures, as shaped by its economic
and ideological frameworks, and as delivered through its conventions of
performance and mise en scène. Lifting the cinematic from immaterial
cinematic space into the gallery space or emphasizing the physicality of the
material object or actor on screen challenges film theory, probing and testing
if its tenets hold under expanded, reworked criteria. It is worth repeating
8
Hatfield, p. 5 (emphasis in the original).
38
Jill Murphy and l aur a r ascaroli
that our concern is not expanded cinema but expanding cinema. As the
century of cinema recedes into the past, and the experience of the cinema
has been fully subsumed into our ways of seeing, feeling and thinking,
how do film theorists read these twenty-first-century reformulations of
the medium and the critique they offer of what cinema is and what it has
been? In this respect, the project intentionally confines itself to a limited
historical focus, with almost all the works considered in the volume dating
from after 1995. Accordingly, the book seeks neither to cover as many artists
as possible nor to produce a history of contemporary art that engages with
film. Rather, it seeks to think about film through art.
Through their chapters, the accomplished film theorists and experts in
this edited collection variously examine artworks incorporating, restaging
and re-presenting the cinematic medium’s specific configuration of space,
experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology,
myth, perception, event, and temporality, and to address the creation of
film theory through practice in contemporary art, the practical illustration
of film theory by specific artworks or artists, the testing of specific film
theories using examples of contemporary art, and the evolution of film
theory to encompass contemporary art.
The different chapters confer on the volume its own internal logic, which
organically divides into ‘materialities’, ‘immaterialities’, and ‘temporalities’.
This is not to suggest, however, that each chapter fits neatly into one of
these classifications. Instead, the various chapters tend to shift between
these headings, inevitably, giving rise to a significant amount of slippage
between the material, the immaterial, and the temporal. Nonetheless, it
is possible to establish a sliding scale that progresses from one concept to
the other, and that leads to a closing section that contemplates what might
possibly come next for the image, in all its multiple forms, whether analogue
or digital, moving or static, material or projected.
Firstly, though, it seems entirely appropriate to commence the collection with artists’ input as they have sown the seeds for this research. The
work of Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder almost embodies the idea of
expanding cinema by theorizing it through artistic praxis. Indeed, it also
demonstrates, as Volker Pantenburg points out in his chapter on Gibson
+ Recoder’s work, how within cinema-inspired artwork the concepts of
materiality, immateriality, and temporality can coexist. In their foreword,
Gibson + Recoder have assembled together an anthology of their artists’
statements on their work, which provides a fascinating insight into the
creative impulse and thinking that typifies the different work considered
in the collection.
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The first chapter in the book proper is one that perhaps best exemplifies
the impetus behind the collection while also foregrounding the notion of
the materiality of cinema in the gallery. In ‘Cinema as (In)Visible Object:
Looking, Making, and Remaking’, Matilde Nardelli considers ‘the material
turn’ of cinema towards the gallery, which has led artists and scholars
to shift their attention to the physical qualities of cinema, particularly
cinema’s objectness, in both its digital and analogue forms. In contrast to
the current tendency to extol cinema’s increasing dematerialization, Nardelli
examines how art has become a privileged place for testing alternative,
even opposing claims, and through the consideration of work by the artists
Runa Islam and Tobias Putrih, she analyses how the evolving ‘objects’ of
cinema in the days of its obsolescence, cross-media transformation, and
digital metamorphosis are theorized. She also suggests that these artists
are putting cinema into art practice in such a way that cinema is re-made,
transformed, and metamorphosed into something which, if not entirely
new, is nevertheless something else that what it was before.
Likewise, Alison Butler, in her chapter ‘Objects in Time: Artefacts in
Artists’ Moving Image’, discusses the ambiguity of the object in film – again
evidencing the slippage between the material and the immaterial – and
how the relationship of film with the object has been transformed in the
transition from analogue to digital, using as examples Tacita Dean’s Day for
Night (2009), about the studio of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, and
Elizabeth Price’s A Restoration (2016), based on the collections of the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums. Butler examines the de-contextualization
of objects by museums and films, extracting them as they both do from
their original location in space and time. However, she suggests that films
unlike museums possess an inner temporality within which time is invented
through the encounter between the artefact and the medium, which rather
than dematerializing, rematerializes the object.
In ‘Materializing the Body of the Actor: Labour, Memory, and Storage’,
Maeve Connolly considers a different type of cinematic materiality in
which artists seek to materialize the acting or performing body within the
physical space of the gallery, using overtly sculptural means, combining
the moving image with material objects, props, or supports. Focusing on
specific works by Cécile B. Evans, Nathaniel Mellors, and Clemens von
Wedermeyer, Connolly considers the use of sculptural media (such as digital
3D modelling, scanning, or animatronics) to actualize acting bodies in the
gallery, and explores how these media function, either explicitly or implicitly,
to articulate aspects of the actor’s labour, memory, and storage mechanisms
that remain relatively undertheorized in film studies.
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As mentioned above, Volker Pantenburg in his chapter on Sandra Gibson
and Luis Recoder identifies how immateriality and materiality exist side by
side in the artists’ work. In ‘How to Spell “Film”: Gibson + Recoder’s Alphabet
of Projection’, he considers their object-based work and their projection
performances, using Hollis Frampton and Peter Gidal as theoretical touchstones. Pantenburg discusses how Gibson + Recoder restages and updates
practices and techniques originating in experimental cinema of the 1960s
and 1970s. However, rather than characterizing Gibson + Recoder’s work
as simply revenants or museological adaptations of their historic models,
Pantenburg instead presents the works he discusses as a playful and deeply
ironic investigation of questions of medium specificity and obsolescence.
Jill Murphy in ‘The Magic of Shadows: William Kentridge’s Distancing
and Exposure in More Sweetly Play the Dance’ also examines the shifting
nature of the material and immaterial in the cinematic as presented in the
gallery, in relation to a recent work of William Kentridge. Murphy examines
how Kentridge uses and then thwarts Plato’s Cave allegory to tease out the
power inherent in giving the audience both agency and work to understand,
choosing to locate his images in the shadows that are most reminiscent of
a moving-image tradition dating from Plato’s time to the pre-cinematic
practices of the nineteenth century. Using theoretical concepts put forward
by Jean-Luc Nancy in relation to the distance of touch and the spacing of the
world, Murphy traces how Kentridge uses this technique to address current
world issues while connecting them to historical traumas.
The immateriality of vision and imagination is the subject of Sarah
Cooper’s analysis in ‘Douglas Gordon and the Gallery of the Mind’. Looking
at works such as Phantom (2011), 100 Blind Stars (2002), and Self-Portraits of
You + Me (2003), Cooper suggests that experiencing these works is akin to
the perceptual reflexivity of seeing and being seen that Maurice MerleauPonty describes, and that Vivian Sobchack relates to the cinema, but with
an essential imaginary layer added, one that is actually constitutive of the
cinematic image – an imagination-image – and that the gallery space allows
Gordon to explore in all its dimensions.
‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’ by Kirstie North also
locates itself between the material and the immaterial. North investigates
how Tacita Dean’s Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002)
telescopes back to film’s origins from the point of its obsolescence as Dean
returns, through Broodthaers, to the era of silent film. In his Section Cinéma
(1971–1972), Broodthaers draws attention to the affinity between analogue
film and chance. While searching for traces of Broodthaer’s former cinema,
Dean herself comes across a trouvaille in the form of model ships that are
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visually similar to the one depicted in Broodthaer’s film A Voyage on the
North Sea (1974). Using this chance encounter as a departure point, North
examines the status of film as a medium – its emergence and its history
– presenting chance as its most enduring, most affective, and now most
threatened capacity.
At this point in the collection, a subtle shift occurs in focus with the following three chapters focusing on the temporality of film through the stasis
of photography. Ágnes Pethő looks at how the ‘photographic’, the ‘pictorial’
and ‘the cinematic’, or even the ‘architectural’, fold together in a convergent
post-media art, focusing on the use of the diorama in contemporary cinema,
photography, and video installations. With examples ranging from Jeff
Wall’s light boxes, to Gregory Crewdson’s cinematic photographs, to a
case study of Gustav Deutsch’s film/installation Shirley: Visions of Reality
(2013), the chapter traces the inflections of such a photo-filmic diorama,
revealing the imbrication of different art practices as an expansion of the
tableau vivant into a versatile ‘cubicle aesthetic’, which fuses narrativity
and visual attraction and reconfigures the traditional dynamic of Michael
Fried’s concept of absorption and theatricality of the tableau form (and
dispositive) in art.
Stefano Baschiera suggests a film-archaeological approach to the dispositive in the digit al era in his chapter on the photographic work of Hiroshi
Sugimoto. Using Giorgio Agamben’s archaeological method as a point of
departure, Baschiera specifically considers Sugimoto’s photographic series
Theaters as a reflection on time and the ontology of cinema itself. Taking a
cinematic perspective, Baschiera examines the regenerative aspect of the
photographic medium in its after-shot, which Sugimoto refers to as a ‘resurrection’, arguing that Sugimoto’s approach leads to a new understanding of
the area of film theory linked to the ontological realism of the medium and
promotes a new reflection on the question of the apparatus in the moment
of its disruption and ‘relocation’, as Casetti describes.
In ‘Time/Frame: On Cinematic Duration’, Laura Rascaroli uses Stan
Douglas’s photographic reconstruction Ballantyne Pier, 18 June 1935 (2008) as
a point of departure to consider the role of the frame and of the function of
framing in determining questions of temporality in film versus photography
and painting. Rascaroli examines how Douglas’s intermedial artwork operates as ‘stilled cinema’, before moving on to discuss the neglected relationship
between frame and filmic temporality in the moving image, particularly
with respect to duration and ideas of the long take and slow cinema, using
Eric Baudelaire’s gallery video Sugar Water (2007) as a revelatory, Bergsonian
case study.
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In the final part of the volume, we turn our attention to what might lie
ahead, given cinema’s emergence into both black box and white cube of the
gallery – and beyond – with three insightful and probing contributions.
Firstly, in ‘Interactivity without Control: David OReilly’s Everything
(2017) and the Representation of Totality’, Andrew Uroskie discusses the
quasi-interactive model of spectatorship the game employs, exploring its
ontology, and identifying ways in which it can help in thinking beyond
models of spectatorship and genre whose validity has become debatable. As
Uroskie observes, formally and thematically Everything refers to a significant
cultural moment in post-war visual culture in which the representation of
totality is central. Uroskie traces the dynamic, scalar perspective of the work
back to Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (1968), which purported to
describe the entirety of the known universe from the smallest particle to
the largest galactic supercluster, and examines how it confounds concepts
of anthropocentric mastery by taking its theoretical cue from the philosophical thinking of Alan Watts, thereby adopting a perspective that is
partial and fluid. As such, Uroskie argues, Everything’s focus is on radically
non-anthropocentric forms of space, time, and subjectivity.
In ‘Post-Cinematic Unframing’, Lisa Åkervall poses the question what happens to cinematic framing in an era of post-cinematic media? In traditional
cinema the frame has a specific relation to the space both on- and off-screen
that allows for an expansion of supplementation of what’s on-screen through
processes of reframing. In post-cinematic media, however, the role of the
frame has changed significantly; it no longer operates in relation to a profilmic space, neither absolute nor relative, real or fictive. Post-cinematic
frames are instead imploded form within, and the image is unframed.
Using two post-cinematic artworks, Camille Henrot’s single-channel video
installation Grosse Fatigue (2013) and Kevin B. Lee’s video essay Transformers:
The Premake (a desktop documentary) (2014), and reconsidering seminal
theories of the cinematic frame from André Bazin to Gilles Deleuze, Åkervall
examines the transformations of the frame in post-cinematic media.
Finally, in a profound meditation on the ontology of the image in the
early twenty-first century, D. N. Rodowick discusses how to give form and
expression to what he calls a critical Image within the vast proliferation
of reproduced images and images of reproduction that are a norm in daily
life. Rodowick deals with this in terms of style, organization of forms, and
construction, using Theodor W. Adorno as a theoretical point of departure,
and suggesting that central to the critical Image are the technologies of
sighting in which everyone is ‘envisioned and produced as images’, and
proposes that new techniques be created to critically interrogate images.
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Exhibitions have stimulated much of the writing in this collection: as
explained at the beginning of this introduction, the idea for the collection
originated in a visit to an exhibition; the book is prefaced by Gibson +
Recoder’s artists’ statements from their exhibitions; many of the chapters
in the book refer to one or several exhibitions; D. N. Rodowick’s closing
meditation on the future of the image germinated in an exhibition appropriately entitled Images. It is thus fitting that we conclude our introduction
with reference to an exhibition we visited three years after seeing Philippe
Parreno’s Hypothesis in Milan, when the Expanding Cinema collection
had already taken its final shape. In December 2018, we visited the Ryoji
Ikeda exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.9 A key figure in
electronic music, the Japanese artist makes sublime audiovisual art drawing
on mathematics, quantum mechanics, and big data. Upon entering the
first room and viewing data.scan (2009) and 4’33” (2010), we felt we had
encountered contemporary art that had absolutely nothing to do with the
cinema. Pure post-cinematic, new-media art. A novel world of computer
graphics, an entirely abstract view of encoded information, digital data,
automated graphs, pixels, and coded time that owed nothing to the cinema
as imagery, as a medium, and as a form of experience of space and time.
As if the cinema had never existed. The fact that 4’33”, a homage to John
Cage’s silent 1952 composition, consists of a blank 16mm film strip that is
exactly four minutes and 33 seconds long did not seem so relevant within
the context of an overwhelmingly digital art. Also the use that, in the next
room, data.gram [no 1] (2018) and data.tron [3 SXGA+ version] (2009) made
of projection seemed at first quite disconnected from the cinematic. But
then we encountered point of no return (2018). A black circle in the middle of a white square is fixed at the centre of a projected vortex of light
that creates a strong stroboscopic effect, accompanied by, or seeming to
produce, a barrage of white noise. The fixity of the black circle and the
rotation create the impression in the viewer of being inexorably attracted
to, almost swallowed up by the black hole. The metaphysical intensity of
the experience, the shape and features of the work, the loud noise, and the
entranced reaction of the viewers all brought to mind the totemic apparition
of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with its
accompanying high-pitched sound, and the mesmerized apes staring at it.
As we finally managed to detach ourselves from the black hole, and walked
behind it, we discovered the back of the work: a perfectly still, blindingly
bright circle, projected by an ARRI lamp in use on film sets. Positive and
9
Held from 15 September to 2 December 2018.
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Jill Murphy and l aur a r ascaroli
Figure 6 ryoji ikeda, point of no return (2018). eye Filmmuseum, amsterdam, december 2018.
photo laura rascaroli.
negative. With the cinema now fully back in the picture, we moved to the
next room, where radar [3 WUGXGA version A] (2012–2018) struck us as
being eminently filmic. Immersed in the darkness of the room, we sat and
looked in subjective shot, as if through the screen of a flying spacecraft, at
the visualizations of star systems and the cosmic images scanned by a radar
projected onto a wide screen. As Jim Supanick has written in a review of
Ikeda’s the transfinite (2011), which included some of the same work in the
Eye Filmmuseum exhibition: ‘[b]y deriving material from astronomy and
genetic mapping, the transfinite acts as a kind of conceptual zoom lens,
fulfilling cinema’s dreamed-of union of inner and outer space, an aspiration
shared by contemporaries Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, and Bruce
McClure’.10 From the purely digital back to the cinematic.
Philippe Parreno, Gibson + Recoder, and Ryoji Ikeda show, in their diverse
ways, how the cinema has finally separated into its material objects, but
is still pervasively shaping our understanding of both inner and outer
categories of space and time, the whole of our human and post-human
experience. By examining film theory as a blueprint for the moving image,
10 Supanick, p. 16
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and juxtaposing it with artworks that render cinema a material object, the
aim of Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema is to
unfold a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that in the
past have been deemed to be virtually incompatible. In doing so, we hope
that this book will enhance our understanding of each medium and, more
pertinently perhaps, their interaction.
Bibliography
Balsom, Erika, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2013).
Bruno, Giuliana, ‘Cinema, Museum, and the Art of Projection: Transient Visions in
the Museum and in Art’, in Extended Temporalities, ed. by Alessandro Bordina,
Vincenzo Estremo, and Francesco Federici (Udine: Mimesis International,
2016), pp. 17–39.
Casetti, Francesco, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
Connolly, Maeve, ‘Conceptualising the Cinematic in Contemporary Art’, in Extended
Temporalities, ed. by Alessandro Bordina, Vincenzo Estremo, and Francesco
Federici (Udine: Mimesis International, 2016), pp. 73–86.
Hatfield, Jackie, ‘Expanded Cinema – And Cinema of Attractions’, Art In-Sight,
27.1 (2005), 5–9.
Supanick, Jim, ‘Come Together: Ryoji Ikeda Traverses the Transfinite’, Film Comment
47.4 (2011), 16.
Youngblood, Gene, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970).
About the Authors
Jill Murphy is an independent scholar. Her research interests focus on the
relationship between film and art history, particularly as regards human
figuration. She has published articles, book chapters, translations, and
reviews in various journals and edited collections and is an editor and
Secretary of the Editorial Board of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen
Media.
Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College
Cork, Ireland. She is the author of five books, among which The Personal
Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallflower/Columbia UP
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Jill Murphy and l aur a r ascaroli
2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford UP 2017), and the editor of
collections including Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave 2011, with
John David Rhodes). Her work has been translated into several languages.
She is General Editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.