This article investigates the effects mirrors in films can have on the composition of a filmic image, the staging of a scene and the viewing activities of the spectators. It discusses four such effects: (1) So-called ‘complex mirror shots’ can modify how spectators look onto the picture as a flat composition by way of a quasi-transformation of the screen shape. (2) They can function as a magnetizing frame-within-the-frame that channels the viewer’s look into the anterior depth of the mirror. (3) By referring spectators to off-screen space and thus making them look beyond the image into its lateral and posterior depth, some specific examples also allow for an intricately layered experience of perception and imagination, challenging and complicating efforts to “read” the image. (4) Finally, mirrors may be a source of spatial complication and can even lead to a full-blown disorientation regarding the status of the image, thus transforming the way viewers understand, problematise and look at the filmic image as such.

Surface and Projection is an investigation of the cinema event, defined as image, projection, space and audience. The project interrogates the place where cinema occurs for the viewer, starting with the special viewing conditions for film watching and the accepted roles they create for the film maker, the exhibitor and the spectator. The artworks in Surface and Projection have been a series of reassemblages of the elements of the cinematic event. The film installation Moving Still Life is the key work. The report starts by defining the event of cinema, drawing on French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry’s 1970 essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus. As Moving Still Life took shape, identifying its art and film historical contexts became part of the wider investigation of the cinematic event. Section 2 teases out resonances with Italian Arte Povera and outlines a brief history of super 8 art film making in Australia. It links these to the specific material grounds of Moving Still Life. Art in the public domain is discussed as the art work was initially conceived as an installation for outdoor public spaces. Section 3 discusses expanded cinema, a primary art historical context. There is a general survey of this early intermedia form as it developed in the US and Europe and its presence in Australia. While I make a case for the four elements that comprise the cinematic event, I expand upon the development of the artwork, where image became a dominant strand of its own. A specific form of film making evolved, focusing on the layered image. The final sections of the report, ‘Image’ and ‘Sequence’, focus on this image work, drawing on Umberto Eco’s 1960 essay The Open Work and American art writer Rosalind Krauss’ writing on installation and post-medium artwork. The deconstructive ethos of the project leads to an analysis of the frame within the sequence and the attacks on the frame made by Moving Still Life and my image work in general. The analysis of sequence within moving images, draws on a seminal 1945 essay by American writer Joseph Frank, Spatial Form in Literature. This builds to a discussion of new media, interrogating its claim for interactivity in moving images, an impossibility while the frame remains the primary unit.

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine Abstract Cinema today is similar to the process of immersing yourself in another reality.<br> You can often find comparisons with a diving, and a kind of contact with the<br> visualized space of the imaginary. The position of human in the process of film<br> viewing has changed today. Now the viewer is turning into a subject who has<br> some special skills of the film literacy, media literacy, and for orientation in the<br> digital dimension of the virtual space of modern life. A person watches a movie, it<br> enriches his social experience, he can see and evaluate those events from the<br> distant past, or events, which were taking place elsewhere on the globe in which<br> the subject could not participate directly. On the other hand, today more than<br> ever, cinematic reality is built into the schemes of thinking, perception, and<br> memory of modern man in the form of str...

The article is an attempt to conceptualize the impact of 3D technology on the experience of a contemporary film viewer. The theoretical framework of the analysis is determined by Edgar Morin’s anthropological interpretation of the cinema, which is, however, considerably re‑interpreted by the author of the paper. The aesthetic distinctness of stereo vision is particularly appreciated here. Besides, French theoretician’s thesis that “the subjective increase [of image’s value] is a function of its objectivity” is discussed. The author argues that in the case of stereo vision it is just the opposite. 3D technology disturbs the projection‑identification process, thus interfering with the fundamental mechanisms of the cinema.

Cinema and film are terms that have been inextricably linked since the Lumière brothers showed their first motion picture Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon in 1895. It is difficult to conceive of one without the other. According to film theorist Jonathan Walley, the vanguards of ‘paracinema’ (such as Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad) have tried to release cinema from the medium specificity of film with works that prioritise time and light, arguing for a cinema without film. The question this project proposes is: can film exist outside cinema? This MPhil by project is led by a direct approach to creating the film image using experimental filmmaking techniques. A series of experiments will look at subject (time, motion, representational imagery) and context (location, site of the pro-filmic). The studio outcomes lead to a critical and philosophical inquiry into theories of time, duration and movement through Henri Bergson and Mary-Ann Doane, assessing how this relates to the notion of what cinema is via André Bazin. A series of installations will demonstrate the tension between the visible and invisible by capturing motion using lensless apparatuses, against a desire to see simultaneous moments of time all at once with a material that divides and segments time. Using expanded cinema strategies, these works will be presented to see how and to what effect film, when presented as projection, object, and as a component of sculptural installation, communicates ideas of movement, space and time. The thesis analyses Jonathan Walley’s three pivotal essays on paracinema comparing the concept and practice to expanded cinema. The filmstrip will be explored through simultaneous exposure, site-specificity of the pro-filmic and installation, printing, projection and hand processing. This will form the basis of a critical analysis of how the lensless apparatus presents the nature of the film image, movement and duration, against forms of paracinema.

MFA thesis 2004, supervisor John Gillies