Amsterdam University Press
IN TRANSITION
FILMCULTURE
FILMCULTURE
ERIKA BALSOM
Exhibiting Cinema
in Contemporary Art
Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Erika Balsom
This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library
(www.oapen.org)
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative
to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model
for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library
aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by
aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe.
Sections of chapter one have previously appeared as a part of “Screening
Rooms: The Movie Theatre in/and the Gallery,” in Public: Art/Culture/Ideas 
(), -. Sections of chapter two have previously appeared as “A Cinema
in the Gallery, A Cinema in Ruins,” Screen : (December ), -.
Cover illustration (front): Pierre Bismuth, Following the Right Hand of Louise
Brooks in Beauty Contest, . Marker pen on Plexiglas with c-print,  x 
inches. Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York.
Cover illustration (back): Simon Starling, Wilhelm Noack oHG, . Installation
view at neugerriemschneider, Berlin, . Photo: Jens Ziehe, courtesy of the
artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Casey Kaplan, New York.
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam
Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam
isbn     
e-isbn      (pdf)
e-isbn      (ePub)
nur  / 
© E. Balsom / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 
The Passages of Cinema 
Projection and Patrimony 
Black Box/White Cube 
The New Blockbusters 
The Myth of Activity 
Media at MoMA 
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 
Post-medium Post-mortem 
Indexing the Past 
A Little History of mm 
Ruinophilia 
Analogue Aura 
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 
Ambivalent Appropriations 
The Four Operations 
Precursors 
The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use” 
Remaking Fandom 
“Room-for-Play” 
VCR Memories 
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 
Anti-anti-illusionism 
Hybrid Forms 
Rehabilitating Narrative 
A Return of the Real 
Two Images of Death 
Conclusion – “Cinema and...” 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Illustration Credits 
Index 
6 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the kind cooperation of many
individuals who assisted in the process of viewing work that often circulates in
only a limited manner: Andrew Beccone, Bram Bots, and Rose Lord at Marian
Goodman Gallery; Janice Guy and Fabiana Viso at Murray Guy; Rosalie Benitez
and Anna Fisher at Barbara Gladstone Gallery; James Woodward at Metro Pictures;
Tanya Brodsky at Regen Projects; Katherine Brinson, Arnaud Gerspacher,
and Sandhini Poddar at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Monika Flores
at Artpace San Antonio; John Kelsey at Reena Spaulings Fine Art; Magdalena
Sawon at Postmasters Gallery; Silvia Kolbowski; Mike Plunkett at David Zwirner
Gallery; Jessica Lin Cox and James Cohan Gallery; Christoph Draeger;
Catherine Clark at Catherine Clark Gallery; Matthias Müller and Christoph
Girardet; Thomas Erben Gallery; Gareth Long; Chris Moukarbel; Colby Bird at
Frederic Petzel Gallery; Kathryn Hillier and Bruce Hackney at Yvon Lambert
Gallery; Nick Lesley at Electronic Arts Intermix; Alex Galloway/Radical Software
Group; Jessica Bradley Art + Projects; Boshko Boskovic at Sean Kelly Gallery;
Johan Grimonprez; Sarah D’Hanens at Zapomatik; and Christopher Moss
at Peter Freeman, Inc.
An additional thanks goes to the many individuals who helped me to secure
permission to reproduce images of the artworks discussed in this book.
This project began as a dissertation in the truly special department of Modern
Culture and Media at Brown University. Infinite thanks to my advisor, Mary
Ann Doane, to my committee members, Wendy Chun and Philip Rosen, and to
Michael Silverman, who was a thoughtful and encouraging voice in the early
stages of this project. I am deeply grateful for the friendship and support offered
at Brown and since by my fellow PhD students, the always-wonderful
trio of Susan McNeil, Liza Hebert, and Richard Manning, and especially the
gang at  Charlesfield.
During a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, the department of Film and
Media warmly welcomed me and helped me to negotiate the transitions from
grad student to faculty member and from dissertation to book. Thank you in
particular to Jonathan Haynes, Erica Levin, Kristen Whissel, Linda Williams,
Federico Windhausen, and the students of my “Art and the Moving Image”
seminar.
Many thanks to my colleagues in Film Studies at Carleton University, particularly
Malini Guha, and to John Osborne, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences, for his support of this project.
Bart Testa, Kevin Wynter, and anonymous readers at Screen and Public provided
me with very helpful feedback on particular sections of the book. I am
especially grateful for the encouragement and criticism of Mieke Bal and Ursula
Frohne.
This project would not have been possible without financial support received
from Brown University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Carleton University.
Most of all, thank you to Catherine Balsom and Michael Gallagher.
8 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Introduction – The Othered Cinema
[T]he need is to propose new answers to the question that is now raised in all institutions
dedicated to modern and contemporary art: How is film to be exhibited and
how is film to attain the status of an artwork?
–Bruno Racine, president, Centre Georges Pompidou, 
To open, an Overture. In , Stan Douglas produced a mm work that recycled
some of cinema’s earliest images and one of its earliest genres, the phantom
ride. Douglas paired recycled footage from two Edison films shot in the
Canadian Rockies, Kicking Horse Canyon () and White Pass, British
Columbia (), with a soundtrack of passages excerpted from Marcel
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Overture consists of three image sections, each
separated by black leader, and six passages of text. These passages are read by a
male voice-over through two repetitions of the image track, resulting in the
same image being accompanied by different text in the second iteration of the
seven-minute loop. The phantom ride celebrates technologized perception,
bringing together two of its most powerful incarnations: the speed of the locomotive
and the mechanical eye of cinema. At a time when it was not possible to
move the camera, the genre functioned as one way of enabling a mobile gaze.
The iconography of the train, meanwhile, is inextricably linked to the birth of
cinema through the inaugural rush of the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train à la
Ciotat ().
In Overture, the train winds around the mountains, supplies views of the
landscape, and travels through tunnels of darkness, offering the spectator a
glimpse of how train travel would appear from the front window of the conductor’s
car. On the soundtrack, a monologue unfolds that is drawn from those
fragile moments between sleeping and waking. Seemingly opposed to the fastmoving
views of faraway lands seen on the image track, the voiceover speaks of
private, internal experience. And yet, as memories rush in and surround the
narrator, he describes the experience in distinctly cinematic terms: “Everything
revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years.” He then goes
on to discuss the inability to separate one sensation from another with reference
to the illusion of movement achieved by the proto-cinematic device of the Bioscope.
Overture thus brings together two conceptions of time that are central
to late nineteenth-century modernity: the public, standardized time that is
closely linked to the development of the railway and the subjective time of in-
voluntary memory as elaborated by Proust.
Somewhere between them – between
regularity and contingency, public and private – lies the time of cinema.
Stan Douglas, Overture ().
Overture would not be out of place amongst the many works of the experimental
film tradition that have drawn upon the preclassical cinema, such as
Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (), which also uses footage of a phantom ride.
However,
Overture is not an experimental film, but a film installation. It belongs
not to the movie theater, but to the art gallery. It is an early example of the ways
in which artists would claim the gallery as a space to investigate film history in
the s, mobilizing two strategies that would become central to this undertaking:
the remake of an existing film and the investigation of mm as a medium
aligned with historicity. Overture is, then, something of an overture for
the explosion of references to film history and uses of the moving image that
would occur in artistic production from around  onwards. From one finde-siècle
to another, it is a return to the subjective transformations brought
about by the invention of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century amidst
those initiated by new electronic media at the end of the twentieth. As an indexical
trace of pastness, the grainy footage of the Edison films contains within it
10 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
the very force of time that Proust’s narrator sought to recover, testifying to the
way in which the past can be summoned in all its anachronism to challenge the
present. As Douglas has remarked, “When they become obsolete, forms of communication
become an index of an understanding of the world lost to us.”
In
Overture, the cinema emerges as such an obsolete form of communication, a
superannuated technology that might possess a redemptive power. Douglas’
use of cinema conceives of it as an old medium, but does so on the horizon of
staking out a new moving image practice that might provide a reflection on the
encounters between novelty and obsolescence, subjectivity and technology, that
mark our moment.
In the decades following Overture, a whole host of artists raised precisely
these questions and, in the process, reinvented cinema within the spaces of art.
Though little explored within the discipline of film studies, this explosion of the
moving image in contemporary art constitutes a primary site at which notions
of cinema have been renegotiated and redefined in recent decades. Cinema becomes
a preoccupation of contemporary art precisely at a time when it is perceived
to be in crisis due to the increasingly consolidated hegemony of new,
electronic media – media that would be digitized and networked as the s
progressed. Cinema enters the gallery on the tide of a culture converging under
the sign of the digital, appearing there as something of an old medium to be
commemorated and protected, as exemplified by Overture. However, though
the cinema is older than new media, it is also newer than traditional media such
as painting or sculpture. It is a technology aligned with mass culture that may
be summoned to provide entertainment and accessibility. Enormous cinemathemed
exhibitions and projected-image installations of high gloss and bombast
underline cinema’s novelty in an art institutional context. Rather than standing
against the convergence of media by commemorating a senescent cinema, this
mobilization of cinema in contemporary art – as a new medium – participates
very much in its movements. It compromises what were once relatively rigid
borders between the image-regimes of cinema and art and emblematizes the
new mutability and transportability of moving images after digitization.
In this book, I will trace out the ways in which this interplay of old and new
media has unfolded across the multifaceted explosion of cinema in the gallery
since . Moving across theoretical debates, curatorial decisions, and artistic
practices, I will bring the tools of film theory to bear on what have traditionally
been considered to be art historical objects, both to shed light on a new sector of
moving image practice and to conceptualize how this sector relates to both cinema
and cinema studies. Following Giuliana Bruno’s assertion of the necessity
of an interdisciplinary study of film and art,
I contend that cinema studies must
reckon with the increasing presence of moving images in the gallery, for it represents
a crucial site where one glimpses a sustained inquiry into the cultural
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 11
meaning and history of the cinema over the past twenty years. In the s,
Walter Benjamin articulated the pressing question of how the advent of mechanical
reproduction, most forcefully embodied in the cinema, might change
our conception of art.
Without abandoning this notion – for it is by no means
settled – I will invert this query for the twenty-first century to ask: how does the
progressive integration of cinema into the gallery and the museum change our
conception of it? And how might the presence of moving images in the gallery
function as a microcosm in which to examine the transformations cinema is undergoing
today in the broader cultural field?
Certainly, uses of film and video have been central components of artistic practice
since at least the s or even reaching back to the cinematic experiments
of the historical avant-garde. Throughout most of the last century, however,
many artists undertook a determined effort to disarticulate any relationship between
their employments of the moving image and the mass-cultural institution
of cinema. Artists working with film and video tended to refuse illusionism and
narrative and instead cultivated alliances with other media, such as sculpture
and performance. Gallery-based uses of film virtually disappeared with the popularization
of video, while video art developed a history of its own fundamentally
apart from interactions with cinema. In something of a paradigm shift,
since  there has been a marked emergence of moving image art very much
under the sign of cinema. If video art had aligned itself for decades with other
media such as sculpture, performance, or even the democratic impulse of television
in an effort to distance itself from cinema, since  one witnesses a
marked cultivation of cinematic tropes and conventions, such as mise-en-scène,
montage, spectacle, narrative, illusionism, and projection. Jean-Christophe Royoux
has termed these developments the cinéma d’exposition (“cinema of exhibition”),
while Catherine Fowler has coined the term “gallery film.”
Chrissie Iles
has referred to this as the “new cinematic aesthetic in video,” writing that, “In
form and content, video is now mimicking the qualities that had always pertained
exclusively to film. The use of the word video as a defining term for a
particular area of contemporary art no longer appears to be either necessary or
relevant.”
In place of video art, artists’ cinema has emerged. Far from reducible
to a single postulate, this cinema is multifaceted. It encompasses single-channel
works alongside multiscreen projection, film as well as video, looped exhibition
and scheduled screening times, an interest in the virtuality of a represented
world or in the phenomenology of spectatorship, an espousal or a rejection of
narrative, and works made expressly for a gallery context and those made for
traditional cinematic exhibition but now transported into the white cube.
Some artists take up the history of cinema as fertile ground for artistic inquiry,
while others avoid specific references to film history in favor of an employment
12 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
of tropes and strategies drawn from cinema. Filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman,
Atom Egoyan, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Abbas Kiarostami, and
Chris Marker have made installation works, while recent editions of the Venice
Biennale have been filled with moving images and the  Whitney Biennial
was cinematically titled Day for Night. The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
created a Department of Media and Performance to deal with its growing collection
of film and video artworks in , and even Cahiers du cinéma produced
a special “Cinéma au musée” (“Cinema in the Museum”) dossier for issue 
in April of that year. The products of the movie theater are increasingly shown
in gallery settings and group exhibitions thematically curated around the notion
of cinema abound. These exhibitions range from using cinema as a rubric to
explore art across various media, to exploring the presence of cinema within
new moving image practices, to exhibiting works originally made for a movie
theater within a gallery, or even concentrating solely on the design of film cred-
its.
This book’s titular notion that contemporary art “exhibits” cinema is meant in
two senses. The importation of cinema into the space of gallery constitutes a
new way of exhibiting or displaying cinema, certainly. But this title also draws
on the etymological meaning of the verb “to exhibit” as stemming from the
Latin exhibere. In its conjunction of ex- (out) and habere (to hold), exhibere invokes
the presentation of something for examination. These works “exhibit cinema” in
the sense that they hold it out to view or subject it to scrutiny. Uses of cinema in
the gallery since  provide a site at which one may discern a sustained reflection
on the kind of mutations and migrations the cinema has undergone all
across the cultural field during this period; in other words, these exhibitions of
cinema exhibit cinema and its contemporary changes. As such, this study may
be understood not only as an overview of how cinema has entered contemporary
art, but also as an intervention into recent film theoretical debates that
speculate on the present and future of the institution of cinema. If it is possible
to identify a single set of questions that has preoccupied film theory in the past
twenty years, it is without a doubt a return to the ontological inquiry, “What is
cinema?,” now understood as an eminently historical formulation to which numerous
answers might obtain. The gallery-based moving image production of
the last two decades is a key site at which interrogations into cinematic specificity
have taken place that both reflect on the material components of the apparatus
and extend beyond them. These works “exhibit” cinema not simply as
celluloid, projector, or binary code, but also as a social and historical institution.
They offer numerous answers to the question of what cinema might be and, in
so doing, may be understood as engaging in film theory through practice.
On a very basic level, the keyword “convergence” designates the operation
by which media lose their medium-specific qualities by being remediated or
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 13
transcoded to data based in binary code.
It must be emphasized, though, that
convergence is not merely a matter of material substrate. Rather, as the products
of cinema become available on an increasing number of viewing platforms, the
heterogeneous representational and spectatorial practices that form a part of the
cinematic institution also shift, giving rise to an anxiety concerning its place – in
both a literal and a figurative sense – in an increasingly digitized and mobile
culture. While anxieties over the increasing obsolescence of celluloid film proliferate,
the products of commercial cinemas have attained a greater reach than
ever before, with markets expanding worldwide through the Internet and mobile
wireless technologies. It would risk historical blindness to speak of a new
ontological instability of cinema, for it is clear that the cinema’s ontology has
always been diverse and variable, developing from a mute technological marvel
through the epic spectacles of CinemaScope and the advent of the blockbuster,
to the small screens of television broadcasting and VCR platforms.
However,
it is certain that since the s, widespread digitization has sparked diverse
and palpable anxieties concerning the fates of both the material of film and the
institution of cinema.
If, for decades, the elements of the cinematic apparatus had been relatively
tightly sutured together to form a discernible entity, recent years have seen
these elements dispersed across the field of culture, shattering the cinema into a
multiplicity of attributes that separate, recombine, mutate, and enter into aggregate
formations with other media. “Convergence” is perhaps an ironic title for
this movement, which might just as easily be named “divergence” or “dissolution”
– for when formerly discrete sectors of culture converge according to a
shared technological substrate, the contours of formerly delimited zones dissolve.
Elements of the cinematic apparatus break out of the previously fixed
network of relations of which they were once a part to now appear far from
their usual configuration in new constellations that inhabit a murky interstitial
space between cinema and its various others – television, the Internet, video
games, mobile phones, and, of course, media art. For Henry Jenkins, convergence
has less to do with technological change than it does with this kind of
circulation of media content across various platforms, national boundaries, and
economies.
In other words, convergence is not simply technological, but also
representational and industrial/infrastructural. This tripartite definition of convergence
has important implications for understanding the mutations of cinema
in the gallery from the s onward, as it speaks to the reconfiguration of cinema
vis-à-vis other media on levels other than technology alone.
Newton’s third law of motion states that for every force there is an equal and
opposing force. No exception to this law can be made for the motions of convergence.
Its dissolution of the boundaries of individual media has been met by a
reassertion of medium specificities produced out of intermedial tension. In the
14 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
face of new media, for example, analogue film has reasserted its uniqueness.
The contemporary moment is not simply one of convergence, but also one that
sees an unleashing of multiple medium specificities that disperse the notion of
cinema across varied conceptual and material spaces. Ideas of what the cinema
might be are now articulated in numerous and incompatible forums, ranging
from Hollywood’s increasing efforts to combat online bootlegging through campaigns
that emphasize the giganticism of the multiplex screen to partnerships
with mobile telephone companies (now rebranding themselves as providers of
“multimedia devices”) to deliver content on tiny, handheld gadgets. When one
speaks about the transformations cinema is undergoing in the early years of its
second century, it is most often in the context of a digital threat, a becomingcalculable
of the film image that makes way for the CGI monsters of summer
blockbusters and movies based on video games. Surely, this is one mutation
that is occurring. But one might also look to the domain of moving image art to
find alternate responses to the proliferation of digital media and the changes
wrought to distribution and exhibition structures. Hollywood is not alone in its
attempt to redefine the cinema.
Responding to the large number of moving image installations he encountered
at the  edition of the Venice Biennale, Raymond Bellour writes that,
These installations, and the forces that animate them, may seem to be the effect of the
so-called “crisis” within cinema and to the difficulties of contemporary art, of which
installations are probably the most vivid manifestation. But if it is difficult to assimilate
these works to the tradition of the plastic arts, the very framework of which they
explode, it is no less difficult to take them as belonging to traditional cinema or as a
supplement of cinema; it would rather be better to continue (to the extent that it will
be possible) to recapture cinema in the historical and formal singularity of its own
device. The strange force of these works is thus to open ever more clearly the indefinable
expansion of an other cinema, according to which the conditions of an aesthetics of
confusion are clarified and amplified. It is better to try to describe its nuances than to
pretend to be able to escape them.
The following pages will take up the task of describing the nuances of what
Bellour terms the “other cinema,” but will depart from Bellour’s preference that
it would be better to “recapture cinema in the historical and formal singularity
of its own device” and maintain a rigid division between this cinema and the
“other cinema.” To do so would be to overlook the many ways in which this
“other cinema” recontextualizes the cinema and reflects on it as it has traditionally
been conceived. Indeed, some components of the “other cinema,” such as
Douglas’ Overture and the mm practices that will be discussed in chapter
two, attempt to re-collect cinema in its analogue form – that is, to both remember
it and piece it to together again. The “historical and formal singularity of
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 15
cinema” is precisely that: historical. It is not something that can be taken for
granted as having an existence independent of the many transitions cinema is
undergoing. Accordingly, in what follows, I will establish a dialogue between
the history, present, and future of cinema as it has traditionally been conceived
and the contemporary gallery-based practices Bellour refers to as the “other cinema.”
I will by no means, however, attempt to collapse these works into an
already existing tradition of cinema for, as Adorno notes in his Aesthetic Theory,
to understand the new only in terms of the old is to engage in a certain form of
betrayal: “In the relation of modern artworks to older ones that are similar, it is
their differences that should be elicited.”
I will pay keen attention to these
differences, but also point out certain continuities, outright rejecting the term
“post-cinema” in favor of interrogating the interactions between old and new
incarnations of an ever-changing entity.
In a play on the terminology of Bellour’s notion of the other cinema, I prefer
to see in these developments an othered cinema. Rather than the strict alterity
Bellour’s term maintains vis-à-vis cinema as traditionally conceived, understanding
these gallery-based practices as an othered cinema is to suggest that
they represent a site at which the cinema has become other to itself. They differ
from it and yet share elements in common as well. The cinematic dispositif that
had maintained hegemony for so long – what Bellour refers to as “the historical
and formal singularity of cinema” – has shattered into its aggregate parts,
which are now free to enter into new constellations with elements once foreign
to it. By using the term dispositif, often translated as “apparatus,” my intention
is to emphasize the necessity of considering the specificity of cinema as residing
not merely in its material substrate.
Dispositif, as defined by Michel Foucault –
rather than by Jean-Louis Baudry, whose use of the term is perhaps more familiar
within film studies – refers to a heterogeneous ensemble of material and discursive
practices whose configuration is historically specific.
Foucault has described
the concept as
a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural
forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as
much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the dispositif. The apparatus itself is the
system of relations that can be established between these elements.

In the case of cinema, the classical dispositif would thus include everything from
the celluloid print to the projector, the theater, ticketing policies, audience protocol,
distribution practices, advertising methods, and more.
This notion is central to conceiving of the relationship between cinema and
the spaces of contemporary art for, in many cases, certain elements of the dispositif
remain constant with cinema as traditionally conceived, while numerous
16 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
others suggest a drastic mutation. This ensemble of parts irreducible to selfidentity
is precisely what the term the othered cinema invokes. It is clear that
cinema no longer means just one thing – though, of course, it never did. Rather
than buy into the notion that all media will converge into an homogeneous digital
field, it is necessary today to interrogate the ways in which the boundaries
between media are both articulated and blurred, to see the pair convergence/
specificity as existing in a dialectical tension with one another that allows for a
new thinking of historicized ontologies rather than a dissolution, or even disappearance,
of a given medium. By demonstrating the heterogeneity and variability
of contemporary cinematic practices, I will avoid reifying cinema into a set of
essential characteristics, thus dismantling predictions of apocalypse (for how
can an apocalypse occur when variability and historical change is taken as the
standard?) and avoiding mythologization (for the centrality of historicity impedes
the freezing of contingency into the eternal nature of myth).
Asserting the variable specificity of cinema necessitates grappling with its
changing cultural status, as it both persists and even expands its reach as mass
spectacle but simultaneously metamorphoses into an object worthy of the protection
of the sanctified spaces of the museum and the gallery. Though this latter
operation has been going on for some time now – beginning at least with the
Museum of Modern Art’s decision to open a film library in , contemporaneous
with the formation of film archives worldwide – the contemporary moment
is representative of a new phase in the claiming of cultural respectability
and artistic value for the cinema. Iris Barry, founder of the MoMA film department,
remarked in  that the relationship of the film library to the rest of the
museum was “rather remote” and compared it to the “slightly ambiguous position
of an adopted child who is never seen in the company of the family.”
Now, however, to continue the metaphor, film has become the golden child of
the museum, showered with attention and praise. One might argue that it is
precisely the continued assertions that cinema is now an “old” or “dead” medium
that make it fit for entrance into the museum – for, to follow Adorno,
“museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association.
Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art.”
The presence of film in the museum and the gallery prompts important questions
about the contemporary status of cinema as a cultural institution and a
mass medium. For Benjamin, cinema was a primary agent in the liquidation of
cult value, that singularity deemed essential to the authentic work of art.
Art’s
basis in ritual gave way to exhibition value, which was characterized by an increased
mobility and availability of the work of art by way of its reproduction. It
induced a withering of aura. Certain elements of the contemporary integration
of cinema into the museum are marked by a reversal of this process. Rarity and
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 17
preciousness are cultivated as, in a digital age of individualized image consumption,
cult value is retroactively attributed to the senescent cinema. Cinematic
ruins and cinematic refuse appear within the museum and gallery as so
many relics of another age. This new cultic attachment to the cinema ranges
from the employment of mm as a medium linked to a spectral historicity, to
the selling of limited-edition films and videos as art objects, and the nostalgic
veneration of cinema as a lost object now incessantly remade and recycled.
These diverse developments are bound together by their shared status as reactions
to widespread fears concerning the contemporary status of cinema.
This
is by no means to partake in the melancholic refrain that proclaims the cinema
to be dead, but rather to emphasize that such fears play an integral role in the
tendency under discussion here. Over the last two decades, the field of art has
become a space in which these anxieties are exhibited and worked through.
To understand the integration of cinema into the museum as simply a matter
of obsolescence, however, would be to ignore central aspects of how cinema has
been mobilized in contemporary art. The activation of a cinematic cult value,
visible in a work such as Overture, is matched by an unparalleled expansion
of the value of exhibition within the museum itself. Museums resemble Adorno’s
mausoleum less and less as they integrate new technologies to provide interactive
and visually stimulating experiences. The new availability of highquality
video projection in the late s and early s was a key factor in
this transformation, as it exploded the restricted scale of monitor-based presentation
and offered gigantic images that could bathe the surrounding architecture
in electronic light. Many uses of the moving image in art over the past two
decades demonstrate not a resistance to but a marked affinity with more generalized
transitions in visual culture brought about by the ascendance of digital
media. The rise of multiscreen projected-image installations, for example, may
be linked to a change in what Anne Friedberg has called the “vernacular system
of visuality” following the past two decades of digitization, wherein a singlepoint
perspective has fractured into multiple windows.
In , Hal Foster described an increasing spectacularization of contemporary
art that abided by a Baudrillardian paradox: spectacle pervades artistic
practice as an attempt to rescue the fading real, but by the same movement, it
exacerbates this loss.
A footnote to Foster’s article reveals a key alliance between
this spectacularization and the cinema:
The work of [Robert] Longo and others also suggests a new “spectacular” model of
the artist...Given the generic or serial form of so much contemporary art and the way
it is “subcontracted,” produced by specialists (the division of labour has penetrated
even this last enclave), this cultural epitome might well be the artist not as producer
(as Benjamin hoped) but as director, Hollywood director.
18 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Foster’s statement is prescient indeed and has turned out to be more literal than
he perhaps intended.
The artist is now a Hollywood director not simply in the
production methods embraced, but also in the big-budget work produced. The
division of labor Foster saw as mimicking that of Hollywood has been fully
adopted by many contemporary artists working with the moving image. In a
sharp departure from the personal authorship proper to the experimental film
tradition, artists regularly employ professional editors, production designers,
and cinematographers as collaborators. Some, such as Doug Aitken and Sam
Taylor-Wood, cast well-known celebrities in their videos and installations. Matthew
Barney’s three-hour Cremaster  () possesses a list of credits as long
as a mainstream feature, including visual effects supervisors, a large crew, and
an entire sound team.
While this is perhaps an extreme example given the
budget and magnitude of that artwork, it is by no means exceptional. Rather
than the artisanal mode of production one associates with experimental film,
contemporary artists’ cinema often involves large budgets and large crews
alike. It is this division of labor that makes possible the production of technically
complicated and polished artworks by individuals who, in many cases,
have received little or no formal training in filmmaking. Such large-scale productions
represent a pole of contemporary moving image art that opposes the
quiet interrogations of temporality and historicity found in Overture, one that
– rather than suggesting any death of cinema – speaks loudly to cinema’s status
as a new medium within an art context.
In short, the integration of cinema into the spaces of art after  must be
seen as abiding by an interplay between old and new media, whereby cinema
is both an old medium in which one might encounter the redemptive possibilities
of the outmoded and a new technology that has wrought dramatic changes
to the place of the moving image in art and to the spaces of art more generally.
The museum is a respite from the privatization of experience, providing a public
space in which to excavate cultural memory, contest a logic of technological
progress, and imagine collectivity in an age of individualized consumption.
However, it must be remembered that it is also an ideological apparatus facing
distinct challenges to attract audiences and compete for consumer dollars at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. Large-scale moving images are an integral
part of what Rosalind Krauss has termed the “late capitalist museum,”
offering
the possibility of a fun, special-effects spectacle that still retains an element
of highbrow cachet.
“New media” is commonly used as synonymous with digital media, but
what is it that makes a medium – or an artwork – new? Adorno notes that the
category of the new has been central to art since the rise of high capitalism in the
mid-nineteenth century and is inextricably bound up in its commodity charac-
ter.
This spurious novelty is present as the moving image is recruited to proIntroduction
– The Othered Cinema 19
vide awe-inspiring fare that will satisfy museum visitors and, in turn, administrators.
However, Adorno also makes clear that the new is equally present in
art’s ability to dislodge established frameworks of understanding; it is a kind of
“blind spot.”
In this second formulation, the novelty of the new lies in its unfamiliarity
and its trespassing of categorical boundaries, something very much
at stake in the liminal space between art and cinema many of these practices
open. As Jacques Rancière has put it, these gallery-based moving image practices
indicate first and foremost “a redistribution in the system of correspondences
of the arts.”
In other words, the novelty of such practices is not simply
the affinity with the commodification of aesthetic experience that they sometimes
manifest, but rather a throwing into question what had once been a stable
and easily definable relationship between art and cinema. Certain familiar attributes
of cinema reappear in unfamiliar contexts, allowing for the creation of
truly new narratives, temporalities, and images.
This study begins in , though certainly the first stirrings of this tendency
may be located earlier, as the opening example of Stan Douglas’ Overture suggests.
Any periodizing mechanism will necessarily be marked by a degree of
arbitrariness, cutting off the flow of non-synchronous developments in order to
impose the fiction of a clear historical break. And yet, as Frederic Jameson has
put it, “We cannot not periodize.”
The year  marks the date of a watershed
exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou entitled Passages de l’image,
curated by Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, and Christine van Assche. This
exhibition, discussed at some length in chapter one, opens a problematic concerning
the relation between cinema, the other arts, and the fate of the image
after digitization that would become predominant in the years that followed
and, indeed, is the very problematic of this book. The location of Passages at the
beginning of the s initiates a decade that would be marked by an increasing
spectacularization of the museum and new initiatives by major institutions to
further integrate moving images into their collections and exhibitions.
The tremendous
institutional endorsement of the moving image at this time is inextricable
from the widespread embrace of high-quality video projection that occurs
at the turn of the decade. Projection weakened video’s link to television – an
apparatus that is a piece of domestic furniture as much as an image support –
and forged a link with cinema and its giganticism. Bill Horrigan notes that conferences
held in  on the history of video art at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago both pointed to  as the end of a
“golden age” of video art and the advent of a different, more cinematic paradigm
of moving images within the gallery, largely due to this “triumph of projection
over monitor-based presentation.”
It is also at this time that one encounters
an increasing number of pronouncements concerning the endangered
20 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
state of cinema. Dominique Païni, for example, has written that  signals the
date after which “cinema becomes the heritage and cultural inheritance [patrimoine]
of the century,”
taking on a surplus cultural value I will argue is integral
to the way in which cinema has been conceptualized within the spaces of
art during the past two decades.
The relationship of the othered cinema to that realm traditionally called
“avant-garde” or “experimental film” is a vexed one. In his account of artists’
cinema and avant-garde cinema as modes of production, Jonathan Walley holds
fast to sharp distinctions between the two.
Avant-garde cinema is personal
and artisanal, while artists’ cinema is collaborative. The modes of distribution
espoused are different, with the avant-garde preferring a rental-based model to
the limited edition that dominates the art world.
Walley asserts that experimental
filmmakers tend to only produce moving image works, while artists often
work in various media beyond film and video, something that largely holds
true but which neglects the non-filmic artistic production of many experimental
filmmakers, such as Bruce Conner, Morgan Fisher, and Michael Snow. Though
Walley’s distinctions serve an important heuristic value, they are lacking in historical
specificity. He asserts, for example, that experimental filmmakers are devoted
to the specificity of film whereas artists are not – a claim that once might
have been true but that is unfair in an age when many “experimental filmmakers”
increasingly work on video, and certain artists such as those discussed
in chapter two are committed to interrogating the specificity of mm film.
Furthermore, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the institutional
boundaries between these two modes of production are in the process of breaking
down as increasing numbers of experimental filmmakers move into the
structures of distribution and exhibition proper to the gallery.
Take, for example, Matthias Müller. Müller had established an international
reputation as an experimental filmmaker, distributing his work in the United
States through San Francisco-based Canyon Cinema, before beginning to produce
work for a gallery context. In collaboration with Christoph Girardet, Müller
was commissioned to produce The Phoenix Tapes (), a forty-five-minute
work in six chapters made up entirely of clips from some forty films by
Alfred Hitchcock for the  exhibition Notorious: Hitchcock and Contemporary
Art at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Since that time, Müller has continued
to exhibit work within a gallery setting, describing the choice in very pragmatic
terms:
The art world’s increased interest in the moving picture cannot be seen as merely a
liberation from the cinema and its limited receptive conditions. Rather, each situation
presents each work with specific challenges... When, through the laws of the art market,
a moving picture is transformed into an object – a work of art issued in a limited
edition – this transformation can seem an expression of bourgeois possessiveness, as
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 21
Peter Weibel puts it. After twenty years of making “experimental films,” though, I
know there will never be enough profit to secure my existence. Thus, there is no alternative
but a gallery, which demands that works be sold as limited editions.
Experimental filmmakers such as Peggy Ahwesh, Martin Arnold, and Jonas
Mekas have all produced moving image installations. This incorporation of experimental
film into the space of the gallery affects not just contemporary work
but the past as well: the historical products of experimental film increasingly
appear in art exhibitions, whether monographic (Kenneth Anger, P.S., New
York, ) or otherwise (Le Mouvement des images, Centre Pompidou, Paris,
). These examples are not meant to reduce the very real economic, institutional,
and aesthetic distinctions that continue to distinguish experimental film
and video from the othered cinema; these are spheres which do continue to
remain different, if not entirely distinct, from one another. However, it is to suggest
that over the past two decades the dividing line between experimental cinema
and artists’ cinema has become increasingly blurred, pointing to yet another
way in which this period witnesses a profound reconfiguration between
the spheres of art and cinema.
The move into the space of the gallery has been similarly pronounced in the
domain of experimental documentary. Like Chantal Akerman and Chris Marker,
two prominent filmmakers working in the documentary mode who have
more recently turned to installation, artists such as Kutluğ Ataman and Amar
Kanwar – both of whom will be discussed in chapter four – made nonfiction
films for exhibition in the movie theater before moving into a gallery-based
multiscreen format. For example, Kanwar’s A Season Outside (), A Night
of Prophecy (), and To Remember () constitute a trilogy of singlescreen
videos about postindependence India, completed before the artist’s first
foray into multiscreen work with The Lightning Testimonies (), an installation
of eight projections that deals with violence against women on the subcontinent.
The gallery provides an expanded field of formal possibilities for
documentary and can also serve as an incubator for practices that might be unviable
outside of it in a cultural climate with decreasing financial support for
vanguard nonfiction practices. As Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl have written,
“Due to the increasing privatization of media and cuts in public funding, experimental
documentary production has again been increasingly pushed into
the art field. The art field has become a laboratory for the development of new
documentary expressions.”
Leaving behind the notion that documentary film
and art are opposed – the former category constituted by a closeness to the
world while the latter is constituted by its departures from it – artists are now
making use of the formal and financial possibilities of the gallery to pioneer
22 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
new nonfiction genres, something that will be explored in this book’s final chap-
ter.
The tendency under discussion here speaks to an increasingly blurred line
between experimental filmmaking and artists’ cinema on the plane of practice,
but it also points to a crossdisciplinary space on the plane of critical and scholarly
inquiry. The border between film studies and art history persists, as large
bodies of moving image practices are neglected by the former due to their apparent
status as objects of the latter. Art history has historically minimized the
role of the moving image while film studies has manifested a distinct phobia
towards films produced by individuals identified as “artists” rather than “filmmakers”
(with Andy Warhol constituting a notable exception).
Tanya Leighton
has speculated that, “To a great extent the problem...has been caused by the
formalist, high modernist allegiances of much of the experimental film world,”
but one must also note that it was the high modernist allegiances of the art
world that led to the marginalization of film as an artistic medium in the first
place.
The reasons behind this divide are complex indeed, but it is certain that
practices residing in the interstitial space between the black box and the white
cube pose something of a disciplinary conundrum that has too often led to their
marginalization in scholarly studies of both art and media. One might argue
that such practices remain fully within the domain of art history and are not in
fact the concern of film studies; however, this would not only perpetuate a disciplinary
divide that has led to incomplete understandings of this field of cultural
production, it would also enforce a bias within film studies towards featurelength
narrative filmmaking that has too consistently resulted in the marginalization
of vital experimental practices.
Though Vachel Lindsay’s  The Art of
the Moving Picture, the first book-length study of film published in the United
States, saw film as deserving a place amidst the fine arts and as involved in a
dialogue with sculpture, painting, and architecture, art and film have too often
remained separated in the academy.
Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art will trace the contours of the othered cinema
across four chapters, unfolding the interplay of old and new media in the
heterogeneous moving image practices that have been deployed in art since
.
Chapter one, “Architectures of Exhibition,” examines how the tension between
new and old media that marks the integration of cinema into the museum
is manifest in institutional and curatorial practices. In this chapter, I interrogate
the changing characteristics of the museum as it moves away from
Adorno’s old museum/mausoleum equation and towards a twenty-first century
institution that prizes attributes of interactivity and accessibility. Here I also exIntroduction
– The Othered Cinema 23
plore which model of spectatorship might best be able to grapple with the particularities
of the moving image installation.
Chapter two is entitled “Filmic Ruins.” In this chapter, I examine how artists
such as Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, and Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de
Rooij use mm film as an obsolescent medium linked to a spectral historicity,
the pathos of the ruin, and the failed utopias of modernity. As noted above, the
use of celluloid within the space of the gallery virtually disappears after the
widespread availability of video. When celluloid returns as a prominent feature
of gallery-based moving image practice in the s, it is inextricably linked to
the rhetoric of a “death of cinema” at the hands of a digital villain and, as such,
engages in a rethinking of the medium specificity of film in relation to the calculation
of the digital. Here, I question what desires and fears reside in the fascination
with celluloid that has emerged concurrently with its increasing obsolescence.
I examine how the superannuated apparatus of analogue film projection
figures as a site of opposition to high-tech novelty, but also endows the film
print with the very aura it was once said to destroy.
In chapter three, I turn to the obsession with remaking the products of film
history that marks the artistic production of the s and s. In “The Remake:
Old Movies, New Narratives,” I discuss the work of artists such as Candice
Breitz, Douglas Gordon, and Chris Moukarbel, arguing that they ambivalently
engage the pleasures of cinema and its status as a cultural vernacular to
reflect upon it as a site of collective memory in an age of atomizing home-viewing
technologies. A focus on cinema’s status as a public institution becomes
paramount. Rather than the refusal of popular cinema that marked film and
video art through the s or the relentless negativity of Situationist détournement,
contemporary practices of remaking ambivalently make use of a nostalgic
cinephilia. They call upon cinema as a memory of lost collectivity while retaining
an investment in a critique of the culture industries and of cinema as an
apparatus of ideological interpellation.
“The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction” is this book’s fourth and final
chapter. Here I leave behind the investigations into cinema as an old medium
that mark chapters two and three and instead examine how fiction and documentary,
modalities previously problematized in artists’ employments of the
moving image, have become central to artistic production since the widespread
embrace of video projection in the early s. In these practices, cinema is not
old but rather offers a novelty that is irreducible to that of the commodity form,
as new technologies of projection are put in the service of new forms of artistic
expression. Radicalizing Jean-Luc Godard’s claim that “all great fiction films
tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend towards fic-
tion,”
the works discussed in this chapter declare the inextricability of these
modes by pioneering hybrid formations that interrogate them both. Through a
24 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
discussion of works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Kutluğ Ataman, Omer Fast, and Amar
Kanwar, I demonstrate that artists rehabilitate cinema’s status as a technology of
the virtual in order to interrogate subjective and historical experience.
In , Jonas Mekas published an article in the Village Voice entitled “On New
Directions, On Anti-Art, On the Old and the New in Art.” In it, Mekas discussed
the proliferation of experimental and expanded cinema practices that he
saw around him. He wrote, “The medium of cinema is breaking out and taking
over and is going blindly and by itself. Where to – nobody knows.”
While one
might adjust Mekas’ proclamation to assert that the cinema no longer goes forth
by itself, but in aggregate formations with other media, it is a sentiment worth
resuscitating today. Gallery-based moving images that both inherit the legacy of
those practices Mekas describes and depart from them are engaging in important
articulations of the histories and futures of cinema. In the pages that follow,
I will provide an account of these practices and some of the questions they raise,
all in an effort to emphasize that, rather than being a time to mourn the death of
yet another cinema, the contemporary moment is characterized by a renewed
vitality and reinvention of the cinema that has opened new paths that will continue
to be explored in the years to come.
Introduction – The Othered Cinema 25
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition
Ephémère cinéma, avide d’éternité.
– Dominique Païni
Upon entering Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales (Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences),
the museum visitor encountered twenty-one columns, each presenting
a spotlighted vitrine containing a single object resting on red satin. The exhibition,
held in - and curated by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Païni for
the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée des beaux arts, Montréal, showcased
the Unica key from Notorious (), the bread knife from Blackmail
(), the lighter from Strangers on a Train (), the yellow handbag from
Marnie (), and other famous Hitchcockian objects. The objects were, as one
critic would have it, “gathered together as if for an occult mass.”
Bernard Hermann’s
scores echoed throughout the room so as to augment the air of eerie
ethereality accorded to these now auratic objects, so many relics salvaged from
the process of filmmaking. Exalted and fetishized, the props were imported into
the museum as cultural artifacts of an age past.
Paul Willemen has noted that there is an element of necrophilia present in
cinephilia, relating as it does to a particular detail or moment (or, in this case,
an object) from a film that is highly cathected and that lives on after the film’s
viewing. It is, Willemen notes, “something that is dead, past, but alive in mem-
ory.”
The twenty-one columns of Hitchcock et l’art functioned as a spatial staging
of this blending of desire and mortification, as the “occult mass” of objects
in Hitchcock et l’art might just as easily be a funeral mass. The institutional frame
of the museum conferred upon these objects the status of senescent artifacts that
live on past the films from which they stem. While this cine-necrophilic strategy
was represented most forcefully in the room of totem objects, it was operative
throughout the exhibition. Cogeval and Païni assembled some three hundred
storyboards, props, posters, and production stills, as well as forty clips from
Hitchcock’s films, all of which entered the museum as magical fragments, endowed
with life and importance due to their status as relics of a Hitchcock pro-
duction.
Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (
November - March ).
The catalogue of Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales specifies that the exhibition
made use of three approaches to put forth its interpretation of the filmmaker.
The first was documentary, explored through the display of costumes, props,
storyboards, and other paraphernalia relating to the production of Hitchcock’s
films. The second “invited the visitor of the exhibition to physically relive the
internal atmosphere of the films,” something accomplished by grouping the
material into evocative thematic clusters such as “Desire and the Double,” “Women,”
“Forms, Rhythms,” and “Terrors,” as well as playing soundtrack music
from the films throughout the exhibition and reconstructing sets from Psycho
(, the shower) and The Birds (, the jungle gym).
And last of all, the
exhibition ventured certain hypotheses concerning influence and aesthetic heritage,
forging links between Hitchcock and the Pre-Raphaelites, Weimar Expressionism,
Surrealism, and other artistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. One found correspondences drawn between a publicity still of
Tippi Hedren for The Birds and Magritte’s Les eaux profondes (), or between
Kim Novak in San Francisco Bay in Vertigo () and both Willy Schlobach’s
La morte () and John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (-).
In the introduction to the exhibition, Païni outlined the curators’ goal: “This
exhibition is not meant to be a demonstration or a succession of comparative
proofs... It is meant to be a reading, an interpretation...”
In short, what was at
28 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
stake was less a definitive statement on the director than the self-conscious production
of yet another Hitchcock, this one a “Hitchcock of art.”
For Païni in
particular, who organized a similar exhibition about Jean Cocteau (Jean Cocteau:
Sur le fils du siècle, Centre Pompidou, ), Hitchcock et l’art is a central node
within a larger undertaking that locates a contemporary cinephilia firmly within
the museum walls, asserting that space as a site for the monumentalization of
film history. At play is a work of valorization that emerges as a present-day
parallel to the efforts of the Cahiers du cinéma group in the s to take Hitchcock
seriously. Now that his status as auteur has been firmly canonized and this
method of approaching films has become second nature in both the academy
and popular culture, it is onto the work of establishing him as an artist on par
with the best-known painters of the century. This emerges as an effort to counter
the ways in which digitization has banalized cinema, broken it down into
pieces and destroyed the rituals attached to its exhibition. Just as the insistence
on authorship at Cahiers in the s involved not only individual figures such
as Hitchcock and Hawks, but also a larger argument about the cultural status of
cinema, so too does Hitchcock et l’art make a claim for new conception of the
institution through the conduit of Hitchcock.
Describing the hall of objects in the exhibition, Laura Mulvey writes that,
“The brilliance of the display was to create the ultimate tribute to, and exposure
of, the fetishistic power of the cinema.”
And yet, with striking emotion for a
theorist who once called for a destruction of cinema’s visual pleasure, she adds,
“[E]ven through tears, it was impossible not to remember that nothing looks
better than when made from light and shade.”
Mulvey’s description suggests
that she was simultaneously moved and dissatisfied by the exhibition. This set
of emotions highlights the ways in which the museum has become a space to
memorialize cinema but does so at a certain remove from the films themselves,
often parceling them out into fragments or representing them via a series of
metonymic substitutes. There are myriad tributes and excerpts, but generally
speaking – exceptions will be encountered later in this chapter – the museum
space is not the location of start-to-finish screenings and nor is it suited to be,
with its visitors strolling through its halls at their own pace. The totems of
Hitchcock et l’art can never fully stand in for the films from which they stem, but
like true fetishes, they compensate for an absence that they in fact reveal
through their overperformance of presence.
Hitchcock et l’art is far from the only recent cameo the master of suspense has
made within the space of the museum. Whether it is in Hall of Mirrors: Art and
Film Since  (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, ), Spellbound
(Hayward Gallery, ), or Notorious: Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (Museum
of Modern Art, Oxford, ), Hitchcock has become something of an artistic
and curatorial obsession.
Exhibitions of this variety come to prominence conChapter
1 – Architectures of Exhibition 29
temporaneously with the cinema’s  centennial and must be understood as
both participating in and responding to a perceived crisis of the cinematic institution
at this time. Passing over into the space of the museum, the cinema becomes
an old medium fit for commemoration. And yet, as Mulvey’s teary dissatisfaction
suggests, how laudatory is this commemoration when it takes place
through fragmentation and displacement? Hitchcock et l’art appears at first to
have little in common with an exhibition like Notorious: Hitchcock and Contemporary
Art, which showcased contemporary artists’ engagements with Hitchcock.
The former imagines a museum of cinema, while the latter elaborates the cinema
of the museum forged by artists such as Douglas Gordon and Stan Douglas.
Both, however, share in the transportation of Hitchcock’s films into a new
institutional space, the art gallery, and both engage in strategies of fetishization
and commemoration that take place through a dismantling of the plenitude of
the original film.
The fascination with Hitchcock in the art of the last two decades is evidence
of the extent to which this period has witnessed museums embrace cinema like
never before. Exhibitions taking cinema as their theme have proliferated and
works originally made for the movie theater have been exhibited in galleries. A
pressing set of questions emerges from such developments: what precisely is at
stake in the contemporary integration of cinema into the museum and in claiming
the museum as a space in which to interrogate and exhibit film history? If
cinema enters the museum as a respite from the banalization and fragmentation
it encounters in a digitizing mass culture, what is one to make of the fact that
these are precisely the processes it often encounters within the museum as well?
How does this integration produce a new conception of cinema? And how do
the specific characteristics of the gallery space change cinematic spectatorship
and open a space for a new kind of moving image practice? This chapter will
take up these questions by examining the institutional and curatorial strategies
of exhibiting cinema within the spaces of art from  onwards. It will probe
what is at stake in this cinematic migration from movie theater to gallery, unfolding
the issues that arise from the placement of the mass cultural medium of
the cinema within a space Brian O’Doherty defines as “expensive” and relying
on an “eternity of display” that values timelessness.
The movie theater and the museum are historically distinct spaces with distinct
determinations. Each possesses an architectural, cultural, and ideological
specificity that now confronts and mingles with the other. Today, as Francesco
Casetti suggests, the question must be not only the Bazinian “What is cinema?”
but also the radically anti-essentialist “Where is cinema?”
The cinema has migrated
to numerous new exhibition situations, changing these sites by its presence
and being changed by them in turn. While discussions of the analogue/
digital transition are certainly important in this moment of technological
30 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
change, it is imperative to also take account of the increasingly numerous locations
of cinema alongside the numerical basis of its new images. Even if the
answer to the question “Where is cinema?” is a quick “Everywhere!” the inquiry
cannot stop there. While one can speak of a generalization of cinema, its
dispersal across various platforms, one must take care to interrogate the multiple
specificities of this scattered cinema and question the ramifications of each
component of it. Tom Gunning has written that there has been an unfortunate
tendency to veer away from “any investigation into the diverse nature of media
for fear of being accused of promoting an idealist project.”
The challenge,
then, is to account for the aggregate nature of media while resisting the lure of
idealism by always maintaining an attention to the historical and material specificities
of the formations under discussion. Cinema may be everywhere, but
everywhere it does not remain the same.
When the movies leave the movie theater and enter the museum, they take
up a paradoxical position: they are at once old, supposedly “rescued” from
commercial exploitation by their entry into the gallery, and also new, transforming
a space that has until recently shut out both technology and mass culture.
Cinema appears as an outmoded image-regime in desperate need of the shelter
provided by the gallery walls. And yet, the recent predilection for large-scale
projected images is an important component of an increasing spectacularization
of the museum space. To what extent can the gallery be said to “save” cinema,
when the most frequent method of showing films made for the movie theater
within the gallery space is in the form of short excerpts installed before a viewer
who strolls past? How can the white cube be a site of sanctuary from the determinations
of the market when its supposed exclusion from such a realm is more
mythic than actual? Dominique Païni has suggested that ephemeral cinema is
eager for the eternity that a residence within the space of museum might provide
for it. One witnesses this phenomenon in the proliferation of cinemathemed
exhibitions and in the memorialization of film history that has occurred
with vigor in the last two decades. But this is only half of the story. Cinema may
be eager for eternity, but art is just as eager for the entertainment and mass
accessibility cinema can provide. Within the rhetoric of the gallery “saving” cinema
from obsolescence lays another set of concerns, concerns that are linked to
the status of the institutions of art at the beginning of the twenty-first century as
yet another branch of the culture industries. As such, it is necessary to interrogate
how the ideology of the timeless white cube persists while also giving way
to another conception of the museum as a technologized space of spectacle.
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 31
The Passages of Cinema
Today, the movies have largely left the movie theater and have scattered all
across the cultural field. The prevalence of discussions of digital convergence
has led to a marked anxiety over the fate of cinema in such an environment, as
well as interrogations into how art might best keep pace with the increasing
mediatization of everyday life. This triangulation of art, cinema, and the impact
of new media was critically interrogated in the important  exhibition, Passages
de l’image. Curated by Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, and Christine
van Assche for the Centre Georges Pompidou, this exhibition announced a watershed
in the display of moving images within the gallery. According to its
organizers, the exhibition “respond[ed] to the desire to understand what started
happening in and among images when it became clear that we could no longer
simply speak of the cinema, photography, and painting, since we had reached a
point of no return in a crisis of the image, when the very nature of images was
brought into question.”
The exhibition undertook a rigorous inquiry into the
fate of specific image-regimes at a moment marked by technological convergence
and a renegotiation of the museum space after modernism. Closely linked
to Bellour’s theoretical concept of the entre-image or “between image,” the exhibition
interrogated the hybrid and intermedial forms arising from the “crisis of
the image” brought about by the increased presence of video and digital images
throughout the s.
The exhibition brought cinema, photography, video,
and digital media into conversation with one another in a manner that mapped
out their mutual contamination and their respective specificities.
Passages de l’image demonstrated that, as Bellour has noted elsewhere, the advent
of the digital image does not vitiate medium specificity.
Rather, it suggests
that “all old images should be interpreted anew on the basis of the enigma
that these as yet doubtful images present to us.”
Though the organizers admit
that these metamorphoses of the image have been well underway since the advent
of photography, they become particularly prevalent following the widespread
dissemination of computer technologies. The exhibition presented an
overview of how these “passages” between discrete media have been interrogated
in cinema throughout the twentieth century and how they have now become
de rigueur in the work of artists such as Dan Graham, Gary Hill, Thierry
Kuntzel, Chris Marker, Michael Snow, Bill Viola, and Jeff Wall. Dan Graham’s
Cinema () was the earliest artwork included in the exhibition, with the rest
produced between  and . Meanwhile, an accompanying film program
included a diverse plethora of works stemming back to .
The thesis at
work was that cinema – as a melting pot of image, sound, and text – has long
negotiated the intermedial tensions that now face contemporary art and that
32 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
this very same cinema, which once existed at a remove from the traditional
mediums of artistic practice, now increasingly finds itself a part of them.
By pairing vanguard contemporary art with a wide-ranging selection of films,
the exhibition insisted on its ability to open up a critical space in which to reconsider
the images of the past in a new light, maintaining an investment in history
while welcoming the moving image into the gallery. It crossed high and low,
seeing a popular film such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? () as having as
much to offer to an inquiry into the status of the image as the unshakable austerity
of Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, ). Passages de l’image opened
a problematic concerning the tension between the discrete medium and the tendency
of both digitization and the increasing technologization of art production
to lead to a disintegration of a given medium’s traditional boundaries. The “seventh
art” had, in its youth, been at the vanguard of the assault against the value
of uniqueness central to the work of art, but was now joining the ranks it once
assailed as its conventional appearance was threatened by new media. In this
sense, cinema stands poised between traditional artistic media and the informatic
age of convergence with which Passages de l’image attempted to grapple.
It is this unique position – newer than old media, but older than new media –
that makes cinema the central focus of Passages and which might begin to account
for the appeal it has had in art since . It is a medium that has always
espoused an aggregate condition that drew upon other media, high and low,
thus providing a model for the new hybrid forms that result from the augmented
influences from both mass culture and technology within the realm of fine
art practice.
The exhibition also signaled that cinema was a loved entity in danger of disappearance.
In his review of the exhibition, Antoine de Baecque concludes by
taking note of the manner in which Passages de l’image was evidence of a transformation
taking place in the conception of cinema: “A mystery constructs itself
before our eyes: the gift of aura, a way, perhaps, of thinking about the museification
of cinema.”
Though cinema was once the primary agent in the liquidation
of aura, for de Baecque, the advent of new technologies and the subsequent
integration of film into the space of the museum have now endowed it with the
special presence Benjamin once accorded to the unique work of art. In bringing
together this becoming-precious of cinema with an acknowledgement of the increasing
intermediality brought about by the digitization of images, Passages de
l’image stands as an early and cogent articulation of the bivalent forces that
would govern the relationship between cinema and the gallery in the s and
the first decade of the new millennium. It critically interrogates a double movement:
on the one hand, cinema’s integration into the white cube imparts a value
of veneration to an endangered institution, commemorating this entity with a
palpable nostalgia that might bestow upon it the “gift of aura”; but on the other
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 33
hand, the cinema enters the gallery on the horizon of a centripetal motion of
convergence that pulls technology, mass media, and art together and into the
great mélange of contemporary visual culture.
Projection and Patrimony
In the years following Passages de l’image, the dispersal of cinema interrogated in
the exhibition continued unabated. The existence of Bellour’s entre-images was
greatly exacerbated when, in the early s, technological innovations in video
projection made the technique increasingly attractive for both artists and institutions.
These projections were distinctly intermedial, summoning mural painting
and billboard advertising, but invoking the cinema most of all. Though John
Belton has called digital projection in mainstream theatrical presentation a
“false revolution” because it offers “something that is potentially equivalent to
the projection of traditional mm film,” the widespread adoption of video projection
(whether using analogue cathode ray tube projectors or digital liquid
crystal diode projectors) in the early s forever changed the possibilities of
moving image art.
Video, which had long been confined to display on one or
more monitors, was now writ large, thus partaking of the immateriality, illusionism,
and giganticism of the cinema.
Video projection technology in fact predates video recording technology and
had been employed in isolated cases in the s and s, notably by artists
such as Peter Campus and Keith Sonnier.
This new medium, however, failed
to achieve prevalence prior to the early s. This was due in part to its bulkiness,
high cost, unreliability, and low image quality, but crucially, was also due
to projection’s tendency to distance the video from its grounding in television
and the work of pioneers, like Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik, who had engaged
with the monitor as a sculptural form. For many early video artists, the
close link to broadcast media provided video with one of its raisons d’être: to
contest the monoculture of television through its own means. Even the title of
the first major exhibition of video art in the United States – TV as a Creative
Medium, held at the Howard Wise Gallery in  – speaks to this palpable
desire. By the late s, though, video’s attachment to television began to shift.
Amidst the increasing popularity of installation art, it began to pull away from
the monitor and pursue spatial arrangements with a greater fervor. Particularly
evocative of this moment is Gary Hill’s Between Cinema and a Hard Place
(): the artist dismantles the monitor and enlarges the scale of the artwork,
while television goes unnamed as a “hard place” and cinema becomes an important
reference.
34 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Gary Hill, Between Cinema and a Hard Place ().
The embrace of video projection is a key factor in the institutional endorsement
of the moving image that occurred at this time, a phenomenon exemplified by
Documenta , in . Curated by Jan Hoet, the exhibition was the biggest,
most expensive, and best attended Documenta since . It attracted ,
visitors and had a budget of an estimated . million deutsche marks (about
$. million in ).
The reception of the exhibition was mixed at best: critics
called it a “circus,” said it was full of “moody hysterics,” and proclaimed that
“more than three-quarters of the work [was] either so-so or downright awful.”
Whether the exhibition was good or bad, one thing was certain: installation art –
and video installation in particular – played a central role. Bill Viola’s The Arc
of Ascent, Bruce Nauman’s Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning), Gary Hill’s
Tall Ships, and Stan Douglas’ Hors Champs (all ) were four of the key
installations on display. This was not the first time any of these artists had
worked with projection: Viola, Hill, and Nauman had used video projection
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 35
before, while Douglas had used mm. But the critical mass of exhibiting them
all together in such a high profile venue signaled a significant shift. One critic
remarked that “There was a time when the exploration of new technologies led
to all kinds of creations that were more or less disorganized and uncertain; all
that is finished today.”
Barbara London, a video curator at MoMA, wrote in
 that Documenta  was a turning point that provided evidence of “the maturity
[of] video as an art form.”
Gary Hill had a slightly different take on
things: “Last year at Documenta,” he said in , “there were a number of
media works, and you could hear critics, curators, museum directors, etc. saying
something to the effect of ‘video has finally come of age.’ You just felt like
saying, ‘no, video has not finally come of age, you have finally come of age.”
And yet, a significant change was occurring: the dominant form of presentation
was shifting from the monitor to the projector and, as this happened, institutions
took increasing interest.
Bill Viola, The Arc of Ascent ().
36 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Video’s turn toward a mode of presentation historically aligned with cinema
occurred precisely as the latter’s status as a bad object began to wane. As the
 centennial approached and cinema’s hegemonic position as cultural dominant
was increasingly compromised, a growing chorus of critics, filmmakers,
artists, and scholars would sing a requiem for it as loved and lost. It is worth
noting that Dominique Païni chooses  as the date that marks the passage of
cinema into a new realm, that of patrimony: “Since , after having been the
curiosity of the century, the leisure of the century, the art of the century, the
culture of the century, cinema becomes the patrimony of the century. Each film is
now also a document, testimony, trace, memory.”
Païni summarizes the implications
of this shift quite simply: “This last mutation is one from industry to
art.”
Mainstream narrative cinema continues to traffic in celebrity and mass
culture, but in the meantime, another conception of cinema, one that would be
incessantly emphasized by contemporary artists and curators (to say nothing of
academic film studies), has arisen. After , the dispersion of cinema throughout
culture in general, which Païni sees as taking place from  onwards,
dialectically reverses to give way to the rarefaction of cinema that had always
existed within it, leading to an interest in its history and its specificity. Spread
too thin over the entire cultural field, a more restricted notion of cinema appears.
It is a cinema in danger of disappearance, one that spawns rearguard
efforts to both remember it and to reassemble it.
Throughout the s, no doubt spurred on the introduction of the DVD in
 and the rise of the Internet, this conception of cinema becomes increasingly
prevalent. In need of preservation, the sites of this patrimonial cinema become
the museum and the cinémathèque more than the commercial movie theater or
even the home viewing console. And once inside those walls, Païni writes, “the
institution of the museum creates artistic value by imposing the value of agedness
and the value of exhibition”.
Amidst fears of disappearance, the increased presence
of cinema within the gallery can be seen as an attempt to take sanctuary
within the privileged and relatively autonomous zone of art. This architectural
displacement allows for a kind of retrospective inquiry to emerge, whereby one
constantly confronts the question, “What was cinema?” Cinema’s loss of dominance
in some ways becomes its gain: within the sphere of contemporary art, a
space is opened for a kind of moving image practice that would reflect on the
historical institution of cinema, interrogate its present condition, and possibly
open pathways into the future. Disregarding the fact that cinema continues to
be many things to many people – box office revenues in the United States exceeded
$ billion in  – this strand of artistic and curatorial practice puts
forth the space of the gallery as a tomb that would house and embalm a moribund
cinema.
This can take place in at least two primary ways: first, the gallery
can serve as an exhibition venue for the historical products of the cinema,
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 37
as exemplified in this chapter’s opening example of the Hitchcock et l’art exhibition;
and second, it can provide a site for the exhibition of a new cinema that is
“purged” or “cleansed” of its associations with the vulgarity of mass culture, a
cinema of the museum to be made by artists, one that will be discussed in the
that chapters that follow.
While the first is closely aligned with Païni’s notion of cinema attaining a patrimonial
value, the second is linked to what Raymond Bellour has termed “saving
the image.”
Bellour uses this term to designate an operation that might
most productively be thought as an attempt to redeem or rescue the image
from the vulgarization and profanation it has undergone in the era of mass media
proliferation through gallery-based production that would rehabilitate qualities
of contemplation and substance. According to this premise, the gallery
might become the site of a new kind of cinematic production that would carry
on the cinema’s thwarted goals, conserving its mandate if not the specific products
of its history. Of course, Bellour’s position rests on a very particular understanding
of cinema’s mandate, one that writes out its relation to mass culture in
favor of a purified, quasi-autonomous art form. Bellour describes the notion as
“the fiction of a cinema saving itself as much as escaping itself, thanks to the
metamorphoses to which it is submitted.”
Cinema is able to pursue its goals
only through a transubstantiation: through a kind of benediction, profane cinema
may be made sacred by its entry into the museum and gallery. Bellour implies
that the domain of cinema proper is now beyond hope, lost forever to the
vapid spectacle of Hollywood’s media-industrial complex. In its place, the
spaces of art will fulfill the lost vocation of the movie theater.
In a similar vein, Thomas Elsaesser has suggested reversing André Bazin’s
suggestion that the cinema saved painting by liberating it from its obsession
with producing likeness to ask if another art might now be in the process of
saving cinema.
Discussing Peter Greenaway’s installation work, he writes that
the artist is “purging cinema, by confronting it both with itself and its ‘others,’
recalling or insisting on a few conceptual features, in an attempt to rescue it
from its self-oblivion by theatrically staging it across painting, sculpture, music,
drama, and architecture.”
By “purging cinema” of its undesirable attributes,
no doubt allied to a vulgar commercialism, and marrying it with high-culture
others in order to rescue it, Elsaesser’s understanding of Greenaway recalls Bellour’s
notion of “saving the image,” as well as his concept of the entre-image,
which produces a nonessentialist conception of medium specificity through an
engagement with hybrid forms.
Bellour and Elsaesser’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of a gallery-based cinema
is wholly understandable. However, it is necessary to interrogate the ideological
determinations of the gallery space if one is to fully conceptualize what
is at stake in this notion of “saving” cinema, whether by providing a new site of
38 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
exhibition for old movies, or by sponsoring a new kind of moving image practice.
According to Bellour and Elsaesser, cinema is granted escape from the
ideological determinations of mass culture, but there is no interrogation of those
of the realm it is entering. While it is true that its location within the gallery is
generative of new possibilities and new opportunities to explore the histories
and the futures of cinema, some suspicion must be cast on the magnanimous
gesture of “saving” cinema. The risk of such a position is that it fails to take
into account the fact that the white cube is far from a neutral container that
would protect the cinema out of an unquestioned benevolence. It possesses its
own history, its own ideology, and its own contemporary predicament – all of
which come to bear on why and how cinema has invaded contemporary art.
Black Box/White Cube
The movie theater is a mass cultural space of boisterous entertainment and clandestine
eroticism. The anonymous relationality, the darkness, the giganticism of
the screen, the imperceptible rhythms of the flicker emanating from the projector
– all these elements serve to buttress the powers of the film itself, consolidating
the spectator’s attentive fascination and engrossment. The protocols of the
gallery space are strikingly different. The light level is higher and the visitor
wanders at will, perhaps speaking to a companion. The activity is endowed
with a sense of cultural respectability, even erudition, and tends to lack the absorptive
capacity of the cinema. The architectural form of the white cube, popularized
in the s, is inextricably tied to the ideology of modernism and the
desire for an artistic autonomy free of the contaminating tentacles of a mass
culture seen as governed primarily by market imperatives. Brian O’Doherty refers
to this pristine space as a “survival compound,” suggesting the strictly policed
borders it enacts between its inside (the autonomous work of art) and
what is outside (the world), while Douglas Crimp has written that, “...the modern
epistemology of art is a function of art’s seclusion in the museum, where art
was made to appear autonomous, alienated, something apart, referring only to
its own internal history and dynamics.”
The display of art objects within such
a setting endows them with an autonomous presence that seems to emanate
from within but is in fact a matter of institutional framing. This erasure of historical
contingency in favor of the appearance of essence and eternity has a
name: myth. Well-spaced and well-lit in an architecture where “[s]ome of the
sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental
laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 39
esthetics,” the object found within the art gallery is framed by the space around
it in such a manner as to radically change the meanings attached to it.
Accordingly, the exhibition space must not be seen as a mere container, but as
a meta-medium to be investigated. It is the means by which art is made visible
and knowable to those who consume it. It transmits individual works of art, but
also much more: it activates relations between works and endows them with
cultural value, it conveys institutional discourses, and it produces a viewing
subject. The gallery does not simply serve as a neutral, protective container for
the moving image, but produces a new cinematic dispositif through its particular
discursive and institutional framing and the various practices associated with it.
Subject to the ideological determinations of the gallery space, a notion of the
history of cinema as possessing a surplus cultural capital comes into visibility.
De Baecque calls it “the gift of aura”; Païni names it patrimonial value. When
the cinema risks being dissolved into the great data flows of the fiber optic age,
it enters the gallery and the museum and takes on a patina of precious rarity.
Despite the prevalence of a commemorative attitude towards cinema, the tremendous
institutional endorsement of the moving image that has occurred over
the past two decades has not simply been a matter of benevolent concern for an
aging medium. Rather, the gallery occupies a paradoxical position: it is the
“security compound” that might best “save” cinema by memorializing the
products of its history and/or by sponsoring its new, high culture variants. And
yet, it is but another site to which the shattered cinema has travelled, participating
in the dissolution of its specificity and trafficking in the same kind of profanation
that it experiences so often in culture at large. When museums display
the historical products of cinema, most of which were produced for exhibition
in a movie theater, the very criticisms film purists level against the inferiority of
the home-viewing experience often hold true: there is a frequent lack of material
specificity, a preponderance of spectatorial inattention, a distortion of image
scale, and unfavorable viewing conditions. But unlike the home-viewing industry,
which at some level acknowledges its secondary status vis-à-vis theatrical
exhibition, the museum has historically been the institutional space where one
encounters original artworks in the best conditions possible. When a museum
exhibits a digital clip of Psycho, for example, it is betraying its historical mission
and asserting new priorities. For an institution apparently entrusted with a
mandate to safeguard cinema, more often one encounters a dilution based on
principles of excerption, format shifting, and distracted spectatorship that
speaks to concerns very other than providing shelter.
In his curatorial statement for the film program of Documenta  in ,
Alexander Horwath wrote that all ninety-six films being exhibited would be
shown in the movie theater rather than in the gallery spaces. One might think
that such a choice would go without saying, but it is in fact a rather unusual
40 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
occurrence in a major international art exhibition. Of the movie theater,
Howarth wrote, “This format and space are based on the physical and technical
characteristics of the medium. They allow film to be perceived on a specific level
of intensity to which it owes its historical success.”
Horwath’s vehement opposition
to exhibiting works made for the movie theater within the gallery is a
minority position, at least within a contemporary art context. Today, it is an
exceedingly common experience to walk into major art institutions and find
digital copies of clips and short films playing on loop.
In Kerry Brougher’s Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since , held at the Los
Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in , one encountered over two hundred
cinema-themed works on display. These works spanned across media and
included films by figures such as Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Kubelka,
Fritz Lang, Paul Sharits, and Orson Welles, shown on monitors primarily in the
form of short excerpts. In an exhibition that purported to celebrate the role of
cinema in postwar art, one might have expected the film image to be treated
with a greater degree of respect. Even when film and video is the sole focus of
the exhibition and works are shown on loop in their entirety, as was the case in
the monographic exhibition Kenneth Anger at P.S. Contemporary Art Center,
New York, in , too often the museum fails to provide a hospitable environment
for sustained viewing. In Spring , Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half hour
Sátántangó () was shown at the Galerie Andreas Huber in Vienna. Approving
of the choice to exhibit the film in a gallery space, one critic wrote,
“...[V]isitors could come and go as they pleased. There were no expectations to
stay to the end, and walking out early wasn’t the insult it is at the cinema.”
Such a flippant attitude regarding the exhibition of cinema is by no means atypical
of art criticism. At best, such exhibitions expose works to new audiences
and to new contexts of understanding. But at worst, they make choices that present
the historical products of cinema under unfavorable circumstances, diluting
their potency and misunderstanding their objectives. In their rush to adopt
new ways to commemorate the cinema as old, museums and galleries have often
neglected to consider that their actions may be inflicting more harm than
good.
Perhaps the most monumental example of a lack of concern for the integrity
of the work is to be found in the installation of Berlin Alexanderplatz ()
curated by Klaus Biesenbach for Kunst-Werke and P.S. in . Here, each episode
of Fassbinder’s fourteen-part miniseries was installed in its own small
room, facing onto a central courtyard familiar from the domestic architecture of
Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood, where the miniseries takes place. As such, the visitor
has a choice of strolling through this hinterhof to see all episodes projected at
once, or to take a seat in one of the small rooms to watch an episode played on
loop. While one admission to the exhibition was valid for as many return trips
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 41
as the visitor pleased, the likelihood of viewing the entire  minutes of the
series is highly unlikely, to say the least, while sound bleeding from other projections
made concentrated viewing difficult. Along with these episodes, the installation
included an audio recording of Fassbinder speaking about the project,
stills, preparatory sketches, and excerpted scenes displayed on video monitors
in another room. Despite the reverential tenor of the exhibition, Biesenbach’s
installation of Berlin Alexanderplatz did more to dilute Fassbinder’s masterful
epic narrative into a series of images to be consumed in a glance by a strolling
gallery-goer than it contributed to a serious understanding of the work. At
the risk of oversimplification, one might venture that Berlin Alexanderplatz
gains nothing from such an exhibition, while K-W and P.S. cash in on the legacy
of Fassbinder and his much-acclaimed miniseries. Fidelity to the work takes
backseat to considerations of how to make its presentation as eye grabbing as
possible. The first step was to eliminate durational commitment; the second was
to situate it within a lively mise-en-scène.
Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz – An Exhibition, KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin ( March- May ).
42 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
The New Blockbusters
The roots of an undertaking like the exhibition of Berlin Alexanderplatz go
back to the s and the emergence of what has become known, borrowing
from the language of cinema, as the “blockbuster exhibition.”
The Treasures of
Tutankhamen exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in  is
frequently cited as the beginning of a trend in museum exhibition to favor the
guaranteed box office revenues provided by accessible material and a wellstocked
gift shop. In ’s Beyond the Brillo Box, Arthur Danto remarked upon
the evolution of a new kind of museum that associates the consumption of art
with that of food or the purchasing of souvenirs.
Already in , Rosalind
Krauss predicted that this “late capitalist museum” will begin to have more in
common with Disneyland than with its previous incarnation:
Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacral
experience rather than aesthetic immediacy... The industrialized museum has a
need for the technologized subject, the subject in search not of affect but intensities,
the subject who experiences its fragmentation as euphoria, the subject whose field of
experience is no longer history, but space itself...
The breathtaking experience of large-scale video installations such as Matthew
Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (-) cannot be far behind. In this new museum,
the projected image provides a monumental, relatively cheap way of delivering
exhibitions with vast appeal. It can fill the large, cavernous spaces of
newly renovated museums and offer audiences an immersive experience.
Confined to a monitor, video could do nothing of the sort. The image on the
monitor remains contained and possessable, of a manageable scale that neither
overwhelms nor dwarfs. Even when marshalling forms of collective address,
the monitor tends to be viewed by a single individual, or a few at best. Its history
is one of private image consumption, often in a domestic setting, and it
retains something of that context even when exhibited in public. It is of an obstinate
materiality, a piece of furniture that remains distinct from the surrounding
architecture. By contrast, the projected image is, quite simply, a public image.
The word “projection” comes from the Latin proiectio, “to throw,” evoking
the way in which the image thrown away from its source, past the spectator and
beyond. The projected image escapes attempts at possession. It operates on a
potentially massive scale that has historically been the domain of cinema. The
image has the ability to meld seamlessly with the architecture that serves as its
support, dissolving interior volumes and opening on to an illusory world. And
crucially, it allows the video image to claim space within the gallery itself.
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 43
This kind of large-scale public image was particularly appealing to art institutions
and major international exhibitions in the s. Half of the , art museums
in the United States were less than twenty-five years old in , with
many of them devoted purely to modern and contemporary art.
The last quarter
of the twentieth century saw the emergence of something of a museum industry,
with a huge number of openings and expansions. Through the s
and into the s, biennials, triennials, and quadrennials proliferated around
the globe. Meanwhile, as Internet connections popped up in every home, visual
culture was undergoing a shift the likes of which it had not experienced since
the birth of cinema. Spectacular architectural commissions such as Frank
Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim (a part of a veritable franchise) and the American
Association of Museums’ think tank initiative, the Center for the Future of Museums,
both testify in very different ways to the museum’s desire to (post)modernize
and embrace the dynamism of the digital age. Cinema, once perceived as
a disorganizing threat, could now be summoned to maintain relevance and accessibility,
as its presence fulfills the new museum’s need for entertainment and
exhilaration. Video art no longer had to be difficult or, for that matter, confined
to a monitor. Instead, it would be cinematic: gigantic and (relatively) entertaining.
The history of cinema – that of narrative and experimental film alike –
could be ransacked to provide a vast array of cheaply available works that
would deliver a maximum visual impact. Thus, the very possibility of cinema’s
acceptance within this rarefied milieu depends on the very motions of cultural
and technological convergence it resists when it purports to save cinema:
namely, an increasing infiltration of art by mass culture, technology, and spectacle.
An interesting relationship emerges: from the side of cinema, art proffers
eternity but most often delivers fragmentation; from the side of art, cinema offers
an upbeat contemporaneity that appeals to all.
The mobilization of the history of cinema as an instrument of mass appeal at
the expense of the integrity of the individual work is evident in Le Mouvement
des images, a thematically curated exhibition held in Paris at the Centre Georges
Pompidou in the summer of . The exhibition was a creative re-hang of the
permanent collections of the Musée nationale d’art moderne. One reviewer
called it “an ambitious cast of thousands extravaganza.”
The exhibition took
up cinema as a thematic framework through which to examine twentieth-century
art, grouping its inquiry into four sections: unwinding, projection, narrative,
and montage.
The exhibition design focused on a central corridor of thirteen
digital projections of works by Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Cornell, Marcel
Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Bruce Nauman, and others, which confronted the
viewer in rapid succession to produce a dazzling and disorienting experience.
Philippe-Alain Michaud, the exhibition’s curator, justified the potentially distracted
viewing the installation might elicit by invoking a resurrection of the
44 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
flâneur that he saw as disappearing with “the theatricalization of cinema”: “It
suffices to pass in front of [these works] for a few moments...What we see in
this biased way, in a manner very unconscious and fugitive, is different but not
less interesting.”
Some of these works were indeed videos made to be shown
on loop in a gallery setting, but on monitors; many of them were made on celluloid
for start-to-finish viewing. No attention was given to the change of format
and/or exhibition situation, let alone the fact that the work was installed in a
crowded manner in a transitory space.
Le Mouvement des images, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, level  ( April
- January ).
Bruno Racine, president of the Pompidou from  to , wrote that the exhibition
“offers a rereading of both twentieth century art and the art of today
from the viewpoint of film; its self-appointed aim is to show how the ‘seventh
art’ now irreversibly conditions our experience of both artworks and images.”
Rather than conceiving of cinema as a historically specific set of institutions and
practices to be investigated, here cinema is a heuristic used to look at a century
of art, reduced to several transhistorical principles also found in other media.
Alexander Horwath described the catalogue’s rhetoric as “send[ing] shivers
down [his] spine” and stated that the exhibition is evidence that
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 45
this critical idea of exploding cinema or expanding cinema in the s and s has
now turned into another connotation of the word “expansion.” Now it’s about expanding
with cinema. By that, I mean museums and the museum structure using
moving imagery as a part of their shopping mall.
No longer does one confront the singular image of the title of Passages de l’image,
which maintained a concern for the specificity of a particular image regime in
tension with the homogenizing thrusts of convergence. Now one confronts the
plurality of images in movement. While such thematic curation can sometimes
facilitate drawing interesting connections between dissimilar artworks, in Le
Mouvement des images, the governing principle, patently suggested by the title,
is one of nonspecific circulation, in which images travel with an ecstatic mobility
that escapes any sense of historical determination.
Michaud has said that, “Today, the cinematic exceeds the dispositif of exhibiting
images in projection rooms, which is a part of a theatrical heritage: it appears
from now on as a manner of conceiving of and exhibiting images.”
The
sense of the “cinematic” – a rather curious adjective-turned-noun – put forth by
this exhibition is something of a spectacular catchall, a purely idealist notion
freed of historical and material determinations. It is meant to infuse the halls of
the Pompidou with the excitement of a shopping arcade – or, in the words of
Jean Baudrillard, a supermarket. When the Pompidou was opened in , he
named the transformation of public culture he was witnessing the “Beaubourg
effect”: functioning according to a model of “cultural fission and political deterrence,”
Baudrillard saw there “a supermarketing of culture which operates at
the same level as the supermarketing of merchandise.”
Le Mouvement des
images supremely fulfils this function, using cinema as its primary tactic.
To the credit of the Centre Pompidou, Le Mouvement des images did not constitute
the institution’s sole engagement with the moving image in the summer
of . Overlapping with a portion of the exhibition was an installation that
offered a diametrically opposed way of engaging with cinema in a museum
context, Jean-Luc Godard’s Voyage(s) en utopie, JLG, -: à la recherche
d’un théorème perdu (Voyage(s) in Utopia, JLG, -: In
Search of a Lost Theorem).
It is in a very different context that Serge Daney
has spoken of “Godardian pedagogy,” but perhaps unsurprisingly, Godard has
something to teach on this front as well.
Though episodes of Godard’s monumental
Histoire(s) du cinéma (-) had been installed at Documenta 
() and he had, with Anne-Marie Miéville, been commissioned by the Museum
of Modern Art to produce a documentary about that institution entitled
The Old Place (), this project marked the first time that the filmmaker
produced a work expressly for an installation context. Godard had long interrogated
the role of the museum, so it came as little surprise that the exhibition
46 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
took up the vicissitudes of cinema’s integration into such a space, standing as a
foil to the many easy yet problematic transplantations of recent years.
Jean-Luc Godard, Voyage(s) en utopie, JLG, -: À la recherche
d’un théorème perdu ().
The exhibition stemmed from a project abandoned in February ,
Collage(s) de France, archéologie du cinéma d’après JLG, which had itself
been borne of the Collège de France’s rejection of Godard’s proposal to teach a
seminar there according to the methodology of Histoire(s).
A sign greeting
the visitor at the entryway to the exhibition made this clear:
The Centre Pompidou has decided not to realise the exhibition project Collage(s) de
France, archéologie du cinéma d'après JLG because of the artistic, technical, and financial
difficulties it presented – and to replace it by another programme entitled
Voyage(s) en utopie, à la recherche d'un théorème perdu, JLG, -.
Rumor had it that Godard took to the sign with a permanent marker the day of
the opening to put “technical and financial” sous rature. The numerous maquettes
encountered alerted the viewer to the original objectives of Godard’s
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 47
“utopian travels,” giving a dollhouse hint of what the nine rooms of his exhibited
archaeology of cinema might have looked like.
In place of this aborted exhibition, Godard made three rooms titled “Today,”
“Yesterday,” and “The Day Before Yesterday” into something of a garbage
dump of culture. The space looked as if it were still in the process of installation.
Unused video monitors lay stacked in a corner, while elsewhere wires hung
exposed and a clip of a “No Trespassing” sign from Citizen Kane () impeded
the viewer from obtaining a clear view of a video screening behind a
metal fence. The rooms were transformed into a sort of necropolis of cinema,
with a proliferation of small, LCD screens showing Bresson, Ray, and Rossellini
like so many gravestones. Stripped of its monumentality and place in the public
sphere, the big screen appeared small scale, in an “exploded apartment” complete
with an unmade bed.
A small train shuttled between two spaces, making
its way through a hole that seemed to have been haphazardly punched through
the gallery wall. Was it a return to the playfulness of childhood, to the innocence
of lost origins, to the  screening of the Lumières? Did it look back at a
mechanical age from the maelstrom of the electronic or reference the deportations
and mass death of the last century?
Scale was a governing problem of the entire exhibition, recurring in the miniature
maquettes, the tiny LCD screens, and the toy train. As an aberration of
normal scale, the miniature is aligned with the interior, the possessable, and
with a negation of the flux of time. As Susan Stewart has written, the miniature
is “a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable version of experience, a version
which is domesticated and protected from contamination.”
While there is
sense that the gigantic never fails to escape one’s grasp, thus linking it to the
sublimity of expanses only partially apprehendable, the miniature reduces the
normal scale of an object to something precious, knowable, and tamed.
Throughout the exhibition, the multiple instances of miniaturization signalled
the destruction of public culture in the name of private property and acquirable
goods. The presence of the tiny screens of private digital image consumption
reflected specifically on the current state of the cinema, but also served as a
node within a larger set of concerns about the fate of the public sphere.
Perhaps what was most telling in this respect was the room entitled “Today”,
into which the toy locomotive tellingly did not travel. The only room to contain
no films by Godard, it was a space that entertained Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk
Down () as a metonymic stand-in for the obscenity of Hollywood alongside
pornography, simulcast television (ESPN and TF), and clippings from interior
design magazines in a makeshift kitchen. Described by James Quandt as a “domestic
hell,” it was this space that most fiercely indicted the contemporary intersection
of consumerism, the media, and neoliberal privatization.
Here, the
glittering surface of the commodity emitted a blinding glare that transformed
48 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
one’s perception of all objects it encountered. This, of course, included the histories
of art and cinema, both of which were banished to the anterior rooms of
“Yesterday” and “The Day Before Yesterday.” For Godard, the collective history
that lies buried within them becomes impossible in the war, porn, and merchandise
of “Today.”
Thus, the entirety of Voyage(s) en utopie was marked by the definitional
tragedy of utopia: it can be no place, it is doomed to fail. However, the infamous
difficulties involved in mounting the exhibition – including Godard’s reported
refusal to speak to Païni, the exhibition’s commissioner – were not the only locus
of failure in Voyage(s) en utopie. Antoine de Baecque made this clear in his
review of the exhibition for Libération: “Godard’s exhibition is a catastrophe, but
the artist is proud of it because this undoing [défaite] of art was at the very heart
of his project.”
A podium discussion regarding the relationship between cinema
and the museum at the Oberhausen Film Festival in  took as its title
the question, “Does the Museum Fail?”
Here, Godard provided a firm answer:
yes, it does, and how. For Voyage(s) was not a failed exhibition, but an exhibition
about failure – about the failure of Godard’s Collage(s) de France concept,
but also about the failure of the fine arts to adequately grapple with the cinema
and all of its implications, and the failure of both of these entities in contemporary
culture. The relationship figured here between cinema, mass culture, and
the museum by no means fits with the notion that the gallery might shelter or
“save” cinema. Rather, cinema and art appear as so much detritus of a fallen
regime.
Godard firmly asserts the place of cinema amongst the fine arts – something
the filmmaker has been intent on exploring through his entire career, from the
presence of Élie Faure in the bathtub of Pierrot le fou () through the tableaux
of Passion () and beyond – not by advocating for its integration into
the museum, but rather by situating both on the same debased plane. He patently
denies the white cube’s mythic timelessness, abiding instead by a statement
he and Miéville made in The Old Place: “Art is not sheltered from time, it
is the place where time resides.”
This is to refuse the spurious eternity conferred
upon art by its institutional frame and instead to see it as constantly in
dialogue with the contingencies of culture at large and as a privileged site
where the movements of history become visible. It is this understanding of the
relationship between art, cinema, the museum, and history that Voyage(s) en
utopie took as its central concern.
Unlike Berlin Alexanderplatz – An Exhibition and Le Mouvement des images,
which attempted to commemorate cinema and infuse it with a new life suited
to the contemporary media environment, Godard exploited the gallery’s very
inability to safeguard cinema. All the rhetoric of art’s ability to shelter cinema
deflates here, as Godard emphasized that the crisis of the black box is equally
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 49
the crisis of the white cube – for both institutions are implicated in the predicament
of what happens to the public culture of the twentieth century within the
digital mobility of the twenty-first. Rejecting the notion of an “expensive” space
of precious objects, Godard turned the halls of the Pompidou into a massive
rubbish pile, with cinema and painting alike consigned to the heap. This suggests
not only a profound cynicism concerning the contemporary status of the
museum, but also a very different relationship between art and the moving image,
one that proposes that the notion of the gallery as “saving” cinema is just
another mystification of the echo chamber of the white cube – an institution that
itself is in desperate need of help.
While certainly the spaces of art continue to cultivate the modernist values of
autonomy, expense, and preciousness O’Doherty describes in Inside the White
Cube, over the last two decades, the walls of the museum have been forced to
become more permeable to grapple with the accelerated mobility of images and
with the changing status of the institution in culture at large. Godard’s exhibition
is both representative of this trend – that a major museum would invite a
filmmaker to produce such an exhibition in the s is virtually unthinkable –
and also a response to some of the problems it poses. Godard’s transformation
of the museum space into a theater of mass spectacle and consumption enacted
on a hyperbolic level that institution’s contemporary crisis.
The Myth of Activity
Though the autonomy of the white cube may be mythic, myths endure.
Throughout the critical literature concerning the subject position created by
moving image installations, one frequently finds a comparison between the
“passive” spectator of the movie theater and the “active” spectator of the gal-
lery.
The assumption here is that the movie theater constitutes a space of ideological
regression, whilst the gallery is a clear-sighted realm exempt from such
mystification. Cinematic spectatorship functions as a kind of straw man against
which the inherent critical value of gallery spectatorship is asserted. The movie
theater is a space of disciplinary confinement; the gallery is a space of freedom.
It is true that the film spectator sits immobile in the red velvet seat, whereas
the gallery spectator wanders through space. And indeed, the notion that cinematic
spectatorship is passive does have a significant place in the history of
film theory. In the s, figures such as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry
linked the darkness of the theater, the immobility of the spectator, and the hypertrophy
of vision at the expense of decreased motor capacity to a regressive
state that enables identificatory processes and sets up a transcendental subjec-
50 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
tion position, shot through with idealism.
Without discounting the importance
of such canonical accounts, it is necessary to acknowledge the great body
of work that has taken place since the publication of these seminal texts, as well
as the immense changes that have occurred within the institution of cinema.
In contemporary discourses concerning the status of the spectator of the moving
image installation, the notion that the cinema spectator is passive while the gallery
spectator is inherently active rests on a spurious mapping of passive/active
binaries onto this architectural difference, as if to conflate physical stasis with
regressive mystification and physical ambulation with criticality – a claim that
holds true on neither end. The obsessive return to the denigration of the movie
theater emerges as a tellingly symptomatic repression. The positing of a strict
determinism between the architecture of exhibition and a critical spectator disallows
any questioning into the ideological determinations of the gallery space
since the gallery is de jure a space of demystification.
The oversimplified model of gallery spectatorship mythifies both cinematic
spectatorship and the exercise of power into ahistorical constants, ignoring their
status as historical contingencies that change over time. As Gilles Deleuze has
shown, a system of control based in principles of mobility and circulation has
superseded discipline and its reliance on confinement as the contemporary diagram
of power.
We have moved from a centralized exercise of power to a
highly flexible and fragmented form of power linked to data flows and an abolition
of interior/exterior distinctions. This diagram of power is marked by a generalized
crisis in the enclosures that marked disciplinary power, and the museum
is no exception: in recent decades the institution has become increasingly
permeable and malleable in an effort to maintain relevance. It has begun to value
flexibility and mobility rather than permanence and stasis. In this paradigm,
to circulate and participate are by no means activities of resistance, but in fact
precisely what is demanded of us in the experience economy.
How, then, might one conceive of the spectator of moving image installations,
if not in opposition to the supposed passivity of the movie theater spectator?
Giuliana Bruno has likened, rather than contrasted, the cinema and gallery
spectators, suggesting that there is a “reversible process” at work between the
two since both involve a “haptic path” undertaken by the spectator.
Bruno is
right to emphasize that there is a mobility, however figurative, associated with
the film spectatorship, despite the physical stasis of its spectator. However, collapsing
the “haptic path” of the film spectator with the literal perambulation of
the gallery-goer fails to diagnose the fact that these modes of spectatorship produce
markedly different experiences of spatiality, temporality, and the work of
art itself. In Le temps exposé, Païni associates the roaming gallery viewer with the
Baudelairean flâneur due to his or her desultory movement through space, an
archetype that Michaud also embraces. In a footnote, Païni defines the verb flâChapter
1 – Architectures of Exhibition 51
ner as: “walking without goal, by chance; using one’s time without profit according
to Le Littré. Le Robert evokes abandonment to the sensation of the mo-
ment,”
something that Païni notes is crucial to the experience of contemporary
moving image installations.
Kutluğ Ataman, Küba ().
Certainly, this is the principle at play amidst the forty screens of Kutluğ Ataman’s
Küba (). The installation relies on the mobility of its viewer to weave
together a complex fabric out of the many voices of residents of an area of
southern Istanbul that serves as a refuge for a diverse group of people united
only by their need and/or desire to live outside of state control to the greatest
degree possible. Each screen displays an interview with a Küba resident, with a
single armchair placed in front of it for the viewer to occupy. As the viewer
moves through the space from interview to interview, armchair to armchair, he
or she engages in an activity of mapping. This trajectory analogizes the work’s
desire to chart a geography that the artist has described as less of an actual area
and more a “state of mind – rebellious, lawless, cohesive.”
Individual narratives
are pieced together into a variable portrait that maintains a tension be-
52 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
tween the component parts that come together in the formation of collectivity.
The work allows each spectator to construct his or her own trajectory at his or
her own pace. The mobility of the viewer here allows for new temporalities and
new forms of narrative that simply would not be possible within the traditional
space of cinema.
This mobility, however, should by no means be conceived of as necessarily
oppositional or as a mark of the spectator’s autonomy from structures of power.
Kate Mondloch has rightly emphasized that in many video installations, “the
active participation element of these works clearly constitutes a constricted request
or demand,” something that may be aligned with a noncoercive power
mechanism.
Contrary to the productive wanderings of the spectator of Küba,
the movement of the gallery visitor can take him or her from one work to another
to another to another in an endless parade of objects to be consumed.
Particularly when images confront one another in a crowded array, such as in
the central avenue of projections in Le Mouvement des images, they lose their status
as distinct artworks and instead become ambient décor. The most that one
can ask is to be allowed the time and space to engage in a sustained consideration
of a work if one wishes, something that is not always possible when both
artworks and people compete for space within the museum. The difference
from the spectator of the movie theater is, then, far greater than a simple question
of mobility versus stasis; in fact, what is at stake is the spectator’s relationship
to time and attention.
As Volker Pantenburg has noted, shifting the focus
from mobility to attention allows the latter to come into focus as a key term for
thinking through the conjunction of cinema and museum, one that is “positioned
at the threshold between two economic fields: the economics of attention
and the ‘real’ economics of money, real estate, and financial resources.”
While Bellour agrees that subject position imagined by the moving image installation
is very different than that of the classical cinema, he points out that
Païni’s likening of this viewer to a flâneur is a weak comparison since “there
would need to be a real crowd for that, and the street is not the Salon.” Bellour
goes on to acknowledge the difficulty of conceptualizing this gallery-based
spectator, stating, “As random and often uncertain as it is, in the situation of a
semi-spectacle inferred by the museum, the work fixates that which one could
call its visitor – but there is no right word with which to grasp this dissolved,
fragmented, shaken, intermittent spectator.”
Certainly, the spaces of contemporary
art are far from the jostling crown of a modernizing metropolis. Nonetheless,
Païni’s conception of the flâneur does hit on an essential aspect of the
experience of viewing moving images in a gallery: a likeness to window-shopping.
In the work of Baudelaire and Benjamin after him, the flâneur is aligned
with strolling through the Paris arcades and experiencing the phantasmagoria
of the modernizing city in an intoxicated haze. In the spaces of contemporary
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 53
art, images are offered up for passing consumption in a manner that mimics
strolling through the arcades and gazing at merchandise.
Philippe-Alain Michaud valorized the experience of the flâneur in his discussion
of the mode of spectatorship elicited by the central avenue of projections in
Le Mouvement des images, when in fact this distracted viewing at times merely
mimics the perceptual regime of mass culture. Like so many of Benjamin’s archetypes,
flâneurie is marked by a profound ambivalence: on the one hand, “The
idleness of the flâneur is a demonstration against the division of labour,” but, as
Anne Friedberg has suggested, “The flâneur becomes an easy prototype for the
consumer.”
If one is to employ the archetype of the flâneur to understand the
spectatorship of moving images in the gallery, it is necessary to keep in play the
Janus face of the concept. It invokes both associations of spectatorial mobility
and of the consumption of goods. This is not lost on Païni, who writes that,
“Flâneurie arises from this sort of deception in regard to images that simultaneously
offer themselves up spectacularly while receding semantically, according
to the model of objects of consumption in shop windows that attract aesthetically
but economically remain unavailable.”
Bellour’s “intermittent
spectator” flickers in and out of attention to these seductive images. At times,
this distracted, mobile apprehension of images might allow the viewer to forge
interesting connections, but at others it offers an experience of simple accumulation
wherein eminently disposable moving images provide a kind of video
wallpaper for a stroll through a technological wonderland. While the concept of
the flâneur has been invoked so frequently and loosely within the discipline of
film studies so as to render it little more than a petrified cliché, its affinities with
commodification, spectacle, and the inattentive mobile consumption of images
render it perhaps more apposite to the mobile spectator of the museum than it
ever was to the immobile cinema spectator. But if it is to retain any heuristic
value at all, it is imperative to keep in mind the fundamental ambivalence of
the figure of the flâneur and to resist a simple equation of mobility with either
criticality or freedom.
While some important accounts of film spectatorship have been deployed
primarily at the level of the apparatus, it has historically been important to also
interrogate how the formal construction of a work functions to secure a certain
spectatorial position. In accounts that privilege the space of the gallery as necessarily
guaranteeing a form of critical spectatorship, this creation of a spectatorial
subject position through textual mechanisms is entirely neglected. When one
compares the difference in the modes of spectatorship elicited by a classical
Hollywood film such as Gilda () and work like Nam Jun Paik’s Zen for
Film (-), for example, one is comparing much more than the difference
between a seated and a mobile spectator. Accounts of spectator positioning in
classical Hollywood cinema, for example, have emphasized how devices such
54 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
as the shot/reverse shot or the eyeline match work to foster identification and
create a stable and safe position for the spectator to occupy.
While such structures
occasionally find their way into moving image installations, it is clear that
no such coherent formal system exists therein to be theorized after the manner
of s film theorists such as Laura Mulvey or Stephen Heath, a fact that surely
contributes to Bellour’s characterization of this spectator as “dissolved, fragmented,
shaken, intermittent.”
Nonetheless, one might suggest that instead of the techniques of suture found
in classical Hollywood, certain moving image installations favor immersive
spectacle, overwhelming the viewer through large-scale projections of a high
sensory intensity – an argument that could also be made of the contemporary
postclassical blockbuster. Artists such as Matthew Barney, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill
Viola make use of extravagant visuals, high production values, and a maximalist
aesthetic of visual hypersaturation and bombast that unsettlingly mirrors the
spurious production of affect and sensation by the image commodities of advanced
capitalism. Rather than luring the viewer into emotional identification
and narrative absorption as a Steven Spielberg film might, they engage in the
parade of surfaces proper to a perfume advertisement. To conclude, it is necessary
to signal the important relationships between such works and a museum
structure that is ever searching for exhibitions that will possess a wide appeal.
Media at MoMA
Though the Museum of Modern Art espouses notably conservative curatorial
policies with regard to the display of moving images in its permanent collection
exhibitions, since its foundation in  under the curatorship of Klaus Biesenbach,
the Department of Media and Performance has delivered large-scale spectacular
commissions by Doug Aitken (Sleepwalkers, ) and Pipilotti Rist
(Pour Your Body Out [ Cubic Meters], ) that meld MTV aesthetics
with sensory intensity and broad appeal.
Such prominent installations testify
to the extent to which the moving image has been recruited as part of the ongoing
becoming-entertainment of art that conceives of the museum-going experience
as exhilarating, fun, and devoid of antagonism. Hal Foster has noted
that the admirable “attempts to open up cultural history through old media” –
something that will be explored extensively in the next chapter – have been
“overwhelmed by the institutional attention given to ‘new media,’” in particular
the “technophilic extravaganzas” of recent video installation.
Foster is critical
of the institutional endorsement of such works for their accessibility, entertainment
value, and sensory rush. He decries the false immediacy achieved by
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 55
this variety of practice because it “aestheticizes, or ‘artifies,’ an already familiar
experience – the mind-blowing intensities produced by media culture at large”;
it engages in a kind of “cultic reenchantment” that mythologizes technology as
spiritual experience.
Despite their differences, Sleepwalkers and Pour Your
Body Out both engage in a kind of euphoria of surfaces that Siegfried Kracauer
saw as characterizing the Berlin picture palaces of the s: “[t]hey raise distraction
to the level of culture,” offering a panacea for lack that is “articulated
only in terms of the same surface sphere that imposed the lack in the first
place.”
One of the primary mass cultural – and eminently ideological – functions
of cinema here finds itself displaced and rearticulated in the twenty-first
century museum with a startling lack of criticality.
Doug Aitken, Sleepwalkers ().
Sleepwalkers literalizes the conception of viewer of the moving image installation
as flâneur by placing him or her outside on West rd Street in New York
City. Aitken, who began his career by directing music videos for the Barenaked
Ladies, Fatboy Slim, and others, consolidated his international reputation when
he was awarded the International Prize at the  Venice Biennale for his
eight-projection installation Electric Earth (). When commissioned by
the MoMA and Creative Time to undertake a major public art project, Aitken
made use of lush cinematography and celebrities (such as Donald Sutherland,
Tilda Swinton, and musician Cat Power) to produce a spectacle of overwhelm-
56 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
ing proportions. The exhibition employed seven enormous projections on the
facades of the MoMA at night from  January to  February , dissolving
the architecture of the museum into a dazzling sea of color to render its spectacularization
quite literal.
Tracing the nocturnal journeys of five New Yorkers, the skeletal narrative
weaves together their waking life and dream experiences in a somnambulistic
haze. Occasionally, the image will dissolve into large pixels or envelop the installation’s
characters in a spinning luminosity, ending finally by overtaking the
representational function of the image with bands of colour that curiously resemble
a barcode – the image as merchandise to be scanned. No character ever
occupies the same screen as another; rather, their individual trajectories combine
and diverge through montage strategies and rhyming activities, such as
turning off a light or drinking a beverage. They begin their day as the sun goes
down, with each leaving a private space to venture out into the five boroughs
on a thirteen-minute journey. After the end of one cycle, all narratives end simultaneously,
characters switch screens, and the work begins again in a new com-
bination.
Much has been made of Aitken’s interest in fragmented, non-linear narrative:
the artist has published a book of interviews entitled Broken Screen:  Conversations
with Doug Aitken Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative, in which he
discusses his conviction that nonlinearity and fragmentation are “truer to reality,”
closer to the “hurricane of modern life.”
Meanwhile, curator Peter Eleey
asserts that “the multipart configuration...of Sleepwalkers blows apart the
one-point perspective automatically set up by the camera, along with its correlative
relationship between vision and power, buttressing its democratic spir-
it.”
However, as important recent scholarship has shown, the demolition of
centralized power does not necessarily lead to democratization, for power continues
to exist after decentralization, just in different configurations.
Within
the society of control, decentralization is the norm and the imperative is to be
mobile, thus tempering any assertion that perambulation through multiscreen
environments might constitute a democratic freedom. With regard to the subject
position created by such a regime, Deleuze writes, “...the man of control is
undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.”
How else to describe Aitken’s
Sleepwalkers? For Deleuze and for many new media theorists writing in his
wake, this is how power now operates, necessitating attempts to exploit the network’s
weak nodes and agitate from within it. But when it comes to Sleepwalkers,
one finds nothing of the sort; instead, the installation brings the viewer a
jubilant celebration of the false freedoms of neoliberalism.
Sleepwalkers was the first major commission of the MoMA’s Department of
Media. The exhibition’s press release made clear the extent to which increased
accessibility was a major goal: “A project like this creates a very different diaChapter
1 – Architectures of Exhibition 57
logue with the public, who we hope will be inspired to think about art in relation
to the city itself, and to the larger urban experience...Sleepwalkers will be
easily accessible to a broad and diverse audience of New Yorkers and visitors to
the city, who can engage directly with an artwork in a vital and unexpected
context.”
Viewing Sleepwalkers did not require museum admission, but essentially
functioned as a video billboard advertisement for the MoMA, perhaps
luring people who would not normally visit the museum back with the promise
of more seductive images of the Sleepwalkers variety to be found on the inside,
accessible for the twenty-dollar admission. With the phantasmagoria of
Times Square less than ten blocks away, it is almost as if the MoMA decided to
voluntarily participate in the city ordinance governing the zone immediately to
its southwest: buildings must display illuminated commercial advertising.
Meanwhile, in the same press release, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg
explicitly linked the installation to an expected increase in tourism rev-
enue.
With high production values and a large crew, such work lends to the
museum space a much-desired injection of hip entertainment, of seductive, glittering
image commodities for consumption. The work devastatingly fulfills Guy
Debord’s definition of spectacle: “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes
image.”
In , the Department of Media commissioned Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your
Body Out ( Cubic Meters). When the MoMA reopened in  following
a two-and-a-half year, $-million renovation conducted by architect Yoshio
Taniguchi, it was endowed with a capacity that doubled its previous square
footage. An integral part of this expansion was the addition of a -foot-tall
atrium on the second floor, an enormous open space just outside the contemporary
galleries that called for nothing but monumentality and grandeur. Rist
turned the vast, white emptiness of this atrium into a throbbing sea of color.
Pour Your Body Out enveloped the entire space, as the volumetric measurement
of its subtitle suggests. Three projections twenty-five feet high and a total
of two hundred feet long transformed the room into a womb-like enclosure of
deeply saturated fuchsia and cyan. In its center, a large circular sofa in pale blue
velvet provided a space for visitors to rest and take in the show. Inside this iris
lay a black pupil, thus forming an eye thoroughly corporealized by its placement
within the womb of projections.
The sixteen-minute video loop engages cycles of fertility and decay through
formal strategies of extreme magnification, colorization, and slow motion. The
lava-lamp aesthetics of oozing hues are achieved by digitally enhanced color
that endows the images with visual qualities of painting or animation; hardly
out of place, for example, is a green strawberry with blue seeds floating in pink
water. There are extreme close-ups on female body parts, fields of tulips, and
flower petals stuffed up a woman’s nose; then earthworms, rotting fruit, bare
58 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
feet in close-up walking across dark, moist soil. A woman traipses across a field
and bathes in a lake, sometimes exchanging positions with a warthog that follows
the same path. The three projections can display three distinct images,
sometimes two of them will mirror each other along a corner axis, and other
times the three projections merge into one. They flow into one another and
across the walls with a fluid continuity. Anders Guggisberg’s ambient indie
rock soundtrack echoes through the space and bleeds into the surrounding galleries,
with the ritornello of a hummed melody burrowing into one’s brain even
after leaving the atrium.
Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out ( Cubic Meters) ().
There is a trancelike intensity to the installation that aims to achieve a sensory
flood of warmth and liquidity. In this sense, Pour Your Body Out strikingly
recalls the “cosmic consciousness” of Gene Youngblood’s McLuhanite Expanded
Cinema, published in . As Youngblood would have it, “We are tragically in
need of a new vision. We shall be released. We will bring down the wall. We’ll
be reunited with our reflection.”
For Youngblood, pioneering moving image
environments outside of the movie theater was one way this altered consciousness
might take shape. In a similar vein, the wall text outside Pour Your Body
Out informed viewers that Rist hoped they would receive “spiritual vitamins”
by experiencing the installation. They were told, “Please feel as liberated as possible
and move as freely as you can or want to! Watch the videos and listen to
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 59
the sound in any position or movement. Practice stretching: pour your body out
of your hips or watch through your legs. Rolling around and singing is also
allowed!” A sign requesting the removal of shoes added, “Please make new
friends at the museum” and on  February , the installation was used as
the site of a yoga lesson.
Pour Your Body Out clearly points to the contemporary transformations of
the museum, as the institution mutates from a graveyard repository of stodgy
relics to a pulsing site of visceral intensity competing for tourist dollars. Rist,
like Aitken, works on the very architecture of the museum space, dissolving its
masses in an immersive experience that tenderly envelops the viewer. Critic Jerry
Saltz’s enthusiastic review of the installation linked this transformation of the
museum to gender. In an article entitled “MoMA’s Sex Change,” he writes, “The
atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a
woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate... This is museum
as hallucination, opium den, Lotus Land, cubbyhole, and pleasure dome. Call it
Trance Central station.”
Similarly, the New York Times noted that Pour Your
Body Out was “arguably the first project to humanize – and feminize – the
atrium.”
These accounts attach a politics of gender to Rist’s intervention into
the museum space and signal its departure from a conception of contemporary
art as inaccessible to or aggressive towards the public and instead align it with a
nurturing and caretaking femininity. Femininity is indeed a recurring concern
throughout the artist’s work, but this so-called feminization of the museum in
no way intervenes into the institution’s collections or its politics, it in no way
confronts the gendering of art and/or the museum, nor does it understand sex
and gender as discursive terrains inscribed with power relations.
Instead, this techno-pastoral brings femininity back to a mute nature in a joyous
exaltation of technologized perception that avoids any possibility of antagonism.
Conflicts between subject, nature, and technology are sublated in a myth
of togetherness and mutual enrichment. She is one with the changing of the
seasons, the recurring cycles of renewal and rot. If Pour Your Body Out is to
be conceived as a feminist intervention at all, it is a feminism already defeated
by its disturbing anchorage in an extra-discursive conception of the body that
equates woman with nature. As the cushy colors and squishy, magnified breasts
come together to coat the white cube in washes of pink, one has to question if
Pour Your Body Out is doing anything more than reinforcing the very binaries
that have served to largely exclude women artists from institutions such as the
MoMA in the first place, while simultaneously neutralizing any ability that
space might have to offer an alternative to the image-saturation of mass culture
by simply rendering it gigantic and by hyberbolizing it – and delighting in that
hyperbole.
60 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Dorothy Spears offers a position on the installation significantly different
from that of Saltz:
The video-and-sound environments of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist are easy on the eyes
and ears – making them an excellent balm for today’s world-weary culture travelers.
And if the same can be said for the lobby of a W Hotel or a Bliss spa, this is certainly
no coincidence... Rist’s tantalizing installations speak the universal language of pleasure
to an audience weaned on Ambien, electronic billboards and echoing, whitewashed
spaces.
What Saltz saw as a provocative feminization of the museum is here viewed as
a transformation of that space into a mirror of luxury consumer zones of pampering
and care – a realm that, one should add, is also closely aligned with a
mythologized femininity. Spears sees Pour Your Body Out as the commodity
form decked out as a rejuvenation of spiritual wellbeing, a postmodern sublime
offering reified images in the guise of “spiritual vitamins” and reproducing the
services for sale in the experience economy. The emphasis on femininity in the
installation reinforces its status as a caretaking, comforting, and compliant enclosure.
It erases a history of what some might find less pleasant feminist interventions
in favor of a fuzzy wholeness concocted from blending a romp in the
grass with beyond-Technicolor effects. There is no debating the sensory power
of Rist’s installation; even Spears allows that it “speak[s] the universal language
of pleasure.” While pleasure is by no means a problem, one must interrogate the
bases on which the pleasures of Pour Your Body Out rest: a neutralization of
the politics of gender in favor of a timeless, essentialist femininity and a special
effects sublime that pacifies and, as Kracauer would have it, compensates for a
lack by the very same means the lack was induced.
Sleepwalkers and Pour Your Body Out indicate the extent to which the
contemporary integration of cinema into the museum must be seen not only as
a matter of protecting or commemorating an endangered institution, but also of
mobilizing its accessibility and entertainment values in order to attract audiences.
Given such a state of affairs, it is important that one maintains a healthy
scepticism about what Pantenburg has called “emancipation theories” of the
spectatorial position put forth by new moving image installations.
Such theories
see components such as a mobile spectator and a multiplicity of viewpoints
as inherently democratic, thus failing to recognize the redistribution of
power in a contemporary society in which centralized disciplinary power is no
longer the dominant diagram. They also overlook the ways in which the moving
image has functioned as a central component of an increasing spectacularization
of the museum space that brings it into a closer proximity to mass culture
than ever before. Curator Roger Buergel has likened the administration of
power in the gallery space to a Foucaultian concept of governmentality, wherein
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 61
the apparent permissiveness of neoliberalism masks power structures that are
now internalized rather than forcibly administered through enclosure and segmentation,
as they were within the regime of disciplinary power: “The ethical
concept of redefining individual behaviour follows the ethics of neoliberal politics:
individual choice, autonomous acting, governance of your own fate, selfinitiative
and self-determined living. The museum seems to be designed to provide
this framework.”
Buergel emphasizes that though the spectator may be
“liberated” from the physical enclosure – such as that experienced in the movie
theater – this is not an escape from power.
Coexisting with the ostensible autonomy of the gallery visitor are a whole
host of invisible constraints that govern one’s conduct and inform one’s way of
seeing. The freedom of moving through space, participating and interacting
with the attractions on display, is precisely the way power functions today; it is
far from something to champion unproblematically as guaranteeing a critical
perspective. If the movie theater was a site of disciplinary power, holding the
spectator immobile, the museum invokes the arts of governmentality and control
to manage its crowds. This however, is by no means a totalizing determination.
Rather, as Deleuze puts it, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to
look for new weapons.”
Every exercise of power offers a possibility of resistance;
the need today is to abandon the notion of the museum as a space of
autonomy and clear-sighted criticality, to confront the ways the institution functions
as a technology of power and a part of spectacular culture, and to formulate
responses to it.
These actions are already underway. One can, for example, identify moving
image work that embraces the antispectacular, cultivating an interest in the obsolete
and discarded forms that constitute the dialectical other of capitalism’s
focus on the incessant production of novelty. Artists such as Matthew Buckingham,
Tacita Dean, and Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij – all of whom will be
discussed in the next chapter – fall under such a heading. Though they might
seem to be diametrically opposed to spectacular culture, they in fact agitate
from within it by mining its detritus. It is also possible to find instances in which
artists embrace spectacle so as to turn against it, or at least ambivalently hold it
up for view. In this vein, remaking old movies into new narratives in order to
question the relationships between subjectivity and spectacular culture will be
the focus of chapter three. While it is sure that there can be no outside, the need
persists to find weak links in the network, or as Bernadette Corporation puts it
in their video Be Corpse (), to look for “new energy coming from dead
things.” This complicates an understanding of the deployment of the spectacular
in art from an inherently negative force to a terrain to be negotiated from
within. Though strikingly different, both of these tendencies are exemplary of
62 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
how cinema’s status as an old medium may be used to intervene in the problematic
of spectacle and contemporary aesthetics.
But to conclude this examination of the “where” of cinema in contemporary
art, it is perhaps most important to emphasize that the dispersion of cinema
across the entire cultural field happens in an uneven and disjunctive manner,
leading to the coexistence of incompatible postulates and unlikely bedfellows.
Convergence is not a totalizing force. Instead, one witnesses an erratic flow that
allows for the cinema to appear at once as an old medium in need of safekeeping
and as a harbinger of mass culture within the museum. In both instances, it
becomes clear that any understanding of the status of the image within the museum
must be considered in tandem with the status of the image outside the
museum. The scalar intensity of the projected image has forever transformed
the white cube just as miniature screens proliferate in pockets and purses everywhere.
Likewise, the walls of the white cube transform our understanding of
the projected image, that entity which has long been a source of simultaneous
fascination and superstition.
Caught between old and new, senescence and
spectacle – and thereby disrupting any understanding of media as a linear
chronology of progress – cinema finds its place within contemporary art. Building
from this framework, the following chapters will move to the level of individual
artworks and aesthetic practices, examining how particular examples
function within the institutional determinations outlined here – in some cases
corroborating them, in others contesting them fiercely.
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition 63
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins
So obsolescence is about time in the way film is about time: historical time, allegorical
time, analog time. I cannot be seduced by the seamlessness of digital time; like digital
silence, it has a deadness.
– Tacita Dean
In , Tacita Dean traveled to the west coast of Madagascar to film the total
eclipse of the sun, a project that would later become the film Diamond Ring
(). By chance, while she was there, she heard of a phenomenon called the
“green ray”: often glimpsed at sea, the brief flare of green light that shoots up as
the last bit of sun dips below the horizon had long been a symbol of good fortune
for sailors. Morombe, Madagascar, was an ideal place to sight the elusive
ray, which takes place under conditions of low moisture and clear air. Also by
chance, Dean had also learned the evening before that Éric Rohmer had faked
the effect in Summer (Le Rayon vert, ), his cinematographer having
waited some two months in the Canary Islands for every sunset before giving
up and going home to the magic of postproduction. This made Dean’s determination
to capture the ray all the greater. Coincidence to coincidence, chance to
chance, The Green Ray () came into being. Dean describes the process of
shooting:
The point about my film of The Green Ray is that it did so nearly elude me, too. As I
took vigil, evening after evening, on that Morombe beach looking out across the Mozambique
Channel and timing the total disappearance of the sun in a single roll of
film, I believed, but was never sure, I saw it.
And indeed, the spectator is never sure, either. The film is not displayed on
loop, like many of Dean’s other works; instead, the mm projector is outfitted
with a push button that will begin the film at the viewer’s volition. Over the
course of two-and-a-half minutes, the spectator sees the golden sun sink below
the horizon and waits for the fatal instant. But before one knows it, the sun is
gone, the sky is dark, the film has ended. Did I glimpse the green ray? Time to
push the button again.
The sun and the sea are recurring figures in Dean’s films: Banewl (),
Totality (), and Diamond Ring feature solar eclipses; Fernsehturm
() and Palast () capture a literal sun setting metaphorically over the
monuments of the former German Democratic Republic; Disappearance at
Sea (), Disappearance at Sea II (), Bubble House (), and Teignmouth
Electron () are films generated from Dean’s exploration of the
story of Donald Crowhurst, a British amateur sailor who jumped overboard
after abandoning a race around the world in a trimaran, taking his chronometer
with him in a gesture that cannot help but be read as carrying symbolic weight.
The sun and the sea function here as thematic and imagistic concerns, certainly,
but they also suggest a certain relation to time. In The Green Ray, the cyclical
recurrence of the sun’s diurnal movements is interrupted – perhaps – by a brief
flash of contingency. This chance occurrence takes place at the meeting of sun
and sea and thus fittingly suggests a temporal relation closer to that of the flux
of the ocean than the regularity of the sun. Though it is governed by tidal fluctuations
influenced by the moon and the sun, in its filmic representations the
ocean is figured as a site of unpredictability and chance, of a disruption of linear
time in favor of the contingent or the unknown that can act as an allegory of
cinema itself. One might think here of the uncertainty of the closing freezeframe
of François Truffaut’s The  Blows (Les  coups, ), of the denial
of human finitude achieved by the ocean-as-thinking-substance of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solaris (Solyaris, ), or even of the photograph of the ocean that
finally brings the inexorable zoom of Michael Snow’s Wavelength () to a
rest, only to open onto another visual field.
Tacita Dean, The Green Ray ().
66 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
At the meeting of sun and sea, The Green Ray attempts to capture a rare optical
phenomenon that might act as an allegory of film, that medium with a privileged
access to the archivization of the chance occurrence and the ephemeral.
Dean herself makes this link between the material base of The Green Ray and
its subject. She was not alone during the filming, but was accompanied by two
others who captured the event on video. Instantly replaying the footage, they
insisted that their video proved that there had been no green flash and that they
had witnessed, in fact, just another Mozambique sunset. Dean writes:
But when my film fragment was later processed in England, there, unmistakably, defying
solid representation on a single frame of celluloid, but existent in the fleeting
movement of film frames, was the green ray, having proved itself too elusive for the
pixellation of the digital world.
Video versus film, digital versus analogue, regularity versus contingency: The
Green Ray mobilizes a larger problematic concerning the contemporary digitization
of the moving image and what happens to analogue film in its wake. It
returns to questions of medium specificity in the face of convergence. The film
demands an investment in the revelatory capacities of celluloid, its powers of
transcription, taking as its subject, Dean says, the possibility of “faith and belief
in what you see.”
She continues, “This film is a document; it has become about
the very fabric, material, and manufacture of film itself.”
Whether or not the
green ray can be glimpsed in this film comes down to a leap of faith and a belief
in the material of film as having a privileged access to the real.
“This film is a document,” but a document of what? Perhaps of a fleeting
optical phenomenon, but certainly of a particular moment in the history of film
and the desires its makers and spectators invest in it. For this “faith and belief in
what you see” is, to be sure, a fantasmatic projection: the spectator fastens on to
the ability of celluloid to render legible contingency precisely in the wake of the
digital’s regularity of ones and zeroes. The investment in the revelatory capacities
of celluloid and a faith in its indexical guarantee must be read as a symptomatic
response to anxieties surrounding often hyperbolic claims of the ungroundedness
and inherent manipulability of the digital. By virtue of
approaching obsolescence, film’s ability to capture ephemeral moments in the
process of disappearance has been highlighted as a quality central to its specificity
as a medium. Though the digital is also capable of such an operation, what
is at stake in the privileging of analogue film’s relationship to contingency is an
investment in the medium as linked to historicity and spectrality. These chance
moments are not made present for the spectator, but persist as remnants of a
lost time, much in the same way that the very apparatus of film currently finds
itself as a relic of a now collapsed regime of image registration and apprehen-
sion.
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 67
It is as much of this moment in the history of cinema that The Green Ray
stands as document as it is of the sunset on that Madagascar evening. Though
discussions of film’s medium specificity as linked to the registration of contingency
go back as far as the exclamations of early spectators that what fascinated
most in Louis Lumière’s Feeding the Baby (Repas de bébé, ) was less the
title action and more the wind in the trees in the background, the frequency
with which this ability has been held up in recent theory and practice as central
to an ontology of the analogue moving image demands historicization and contextualization
if it is to be adequately understood.
The Green Ray is not alone in regard to such concerns. The contemporary
insistence on using mm film in the gallery in tandem with explorations of the
contingent, the ephemeral, or the disappearing, is striking. Roughly concurrent
with cinema’s  centennial, the use of celluloid returns as a major feature of
moving image art for the first time since the advent of video displaced the film
installations of the late s and early s. The reentry of mm into the
gallery in the s brings a host of concerns very different from those at stake
in this earlier moment. The s-s’ baring of the apparatus in conjunction
with a phenomenology of spectatorship has shifted to an exploration of history
and the obsolescent, marking a profound reconfiguration of the medium’s specificity.
This can be witnessed not only in Tacita Dean’s work, but is also central
to artists such as Matthew Buckingham, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Stan
Douglas, Sharon Lockhart, and Ben Rivers. This employment of mm may be
seen as part of a larger problematic of obsolescence in contemporary art that
could include work as diverse as Jane and Louise Wilson’s video installations of
disused sites of bureaucratic power (Stasi City, ), James Coleman’s use of
the slide projector (Initials, -), or William Kentridge’s explorations
into early cinema through the vehicle of hand-drawn animation (Seven Fragments
for Georges Méliès, ).
This chapter will build a theoretical framework in which to consider how best
to locate such contemporary practices and their insistence on both the institution
of cinema and the material of film as superannuated. Hal Foster has remarked,
“There are usually two dynamics at these new technological moments.
There are artists who want to push the futuristic freedoms of new media and
others who want to look at what this apparent leap forward opens up in the
past, the obsolete.”
This chapter will deal with artists who fit into this second
category, who, through practice, engage the opportunity Thomas Elsaesser sees
the digital as having provided for film theorists, namely its function as “a zerodegree
that allows one to reflect upon one’s understanding of both film history
and cinema theory.”
The Green Ray explicitly invokes discourses of medium specificity, but as is
demonstrated by the relationship between the film’s muteness and the rhetoric
68 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
of analogue exceptionality that pervades Dean’s writings about it, this configuration
of film’s medium specificity has as much to do with the discourses surrounding
the medium and its historical emplacement as it does with the inherent
qualities of its physical support. In The Green Ray, as is the case for
practically all of Dean’s films, the artist’s writings, which she describes as
“asides,” function an important textual supplements. The film text itself might
eschew narrative, but through this supplementary dimension, the films enter
into a series of interlocking stories and journeys that run throughout the artist’s
practice. But one must also consider the ways in which other kinds of discourses
constitute a contemporary understanding of the medium specificity of film. In
the case of artists’ employments of celluloid, for example, the institutional and
economic discourses of the gallery and the museum must be taken into account.
In the contemporary gallery, analogue film is figured as an old medium, a
remnant of a cinema now in ruins. It has a privileged link to ephemerality and
historicity – qualities that have also found a significant place in discussions of
medium specificity in recent film theory. To call something an “old medium” is
to assert that this medium has a history; that is, it is to assert that the very concept
of what might count as a medium is a profoundly historical category. These
works assert the historical variability of film’s specificity, but go further than this
to posit film’s specificity as inextricable from its relationship to the past. While
the films under consideration here do not make specific reference to the history
of cinema, there is a discernible interest in interrogating the relationship of the
film to the archivization of the past, and in doing so at a point in its own history
at which it might be considered as antiquated. Film processing labs are closing
rapidly and the U.S. National Association of Theater Owners estimates that
mm projection will be out of commercial cinemas by the end of .
Such
a situation leads to a consideration of film as an old medium, one that occurs
not only by virtue of form-content relationships wherein celluloid is used to
deal with aged or disappearing subjects, but also by placing film inside the gallery
as an object of aesthetic contemplation.
By attaching importance to the
film print itself as an art object, film leaves the realm of mass cultural circulation
to enter a different economy of consumption.
To raise the question of medium specificity is to situate recent mm gallery
practice squarely amidst two related but separate discourses that take up the
notion of a crisis in the idea of the medium: from media studies, convergence,
and from art history, Rosalind Krauss’ formulation of a “post-medium condition.”
This chapter will explore the relationship between convergence and specificity
as one of dialectical movement, demonstrating how it is precisely in tandem
with an anxiety over the limits of a medium that one finds articulations of
its specificity. To speak of medium specificity in this context is not to partake in
a disciplinary orthodoxy that tries to demarcate a territory of the uncontamiChapter
2 – Filmic Ruins 69
nated object of “cinema,” but rather to open film studies to the changing contours
of its object, foregoing a purity of cinema for the possibilities that may be
generated out of its continuing metamorphosis. If one takes seriously Hollis
Frampton’s claim that “...no activity can become an art until its proper epoch
has ended and it has dwindled, as an aid of survival, into total obsolescence,”
there is an intimate connection between the increasing obsolescence of celluloid
and its current configuration within the gallery space – one that suggests a productive
transformation of the medium much more than its death.
Post-medium Post-mortem
Any contemporary formulation of medium specificity must situate the concept
alongside the increasing digitization of culture, a condition that sees the notion
of the discrete medium challenged by the centripetal motions of convergence.
As noted in the introduction, one meaning of the keyword “convergence” is the
ability of new media to translate “old” media from one format to another, to
transcode all media to a numerical representation of ones and zeros that make
media programmable. Friedrich Kittler states the consequences of this quite suc-
cinctly:
The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among
individual media...Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number:
quantity without image, sound, or voice. And once optical fibre networks turn formerly
distinct data flows into series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated
into any other. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation, transformation,
synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total
media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium.
The movement of convergence, however, may not be confined to the level of
technology alone. Rather, one must recall Henry Jenkins’ conviction that convergence
designates a broader cultural shift that involves a larger reconfiguration
of media systems on a global level, encompassing the ways in which content
now achieves possibilities of circulation heretofore unknown.
The new
presence of cinema in the gallery cannot be understood outside of this reorganization
spanning across all sectors of culture.
If, for media studies, anxieties over the formerly clear boundaries of media
take the form of questions of convergence, in art history, the dialogue is framed
in a slightly different, but certainly related, manner. In her lecture-turned-book,
“A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind
Krauss outlines the state of the medium in contemporary art, tracing the fallout
70 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
of the exhausted modernist paradigm of medium specificity. If digital convergence
is one reason discussions of medium specificity have receded, another is
the term’s inevitable invocation of the specters of modernism, formalism, essentialism,
and of Clement Greenberg – perhaps the most influential theorist of
medium specificity of the twentieth century. Very much in line with the locus
classicus of medium specificity arguments, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 
Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, Greenberg argued that
with modern art, each medium should engage in a process of distillation and
self-criticism, to undergo a radical reduction so as to reach the medium’s essential
qualities. In short, this trajectory involved the pursuit of excellence through
limitation.
The notion of more firmly entrenching a medium in its area of competence
demonstrates Greenberg’s commitment to a centered, autonomous
work that would form a monad capable of resisting ever-insidious mass culture.
This programmatic prescription of autotelic pruning led to an emptying of the
medium of anything extraneous to its essence, a movement that would find its
apogee and breaking point in minimalism.
By the mid-s, modernist unity
begins to fracture, leading to a dispersed notion of “art in general” and an increasing
interest in inter- and multi-media.
Krauss’ elaboration of the “post-medium condition” – a term that, with a revealing
parapraxis, might quickly flip to “postmodern condition” – details what
happened next. This notion begins as a critique of the essentialist unity of the
modernist medium in the name of fragmentation, self-difference, and an undoing
of the autonomy of the work of art. Film is central here, since it provides
a model of a medium with an aggregate nature, finding its conceptualization in
the amalgamation of parts that make up the term “apparatus.”
By the late
s, the essential unity of the modernist medium had become untenable and
led instead to a conception of the medium “as differential, self-differing, and
thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of
their support.”
At first, this was a welcome change. Krauss’ seminal  essay,
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” happily problematized the unity of the
modernist category of “sculpture,” linking art theory to a broader poststructuralist
critique of essence and identity in order to break away from a conception of
the medium as rigidly and ahistorically defined.
Though not named as such,
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” provides an early formulation of what
would later become known as the “post-medium condition.” But as time went
by, what began as a progressive critique of modernist essentialism would become,
in Krauss’ view, a default position that consolidated the generalization of
the aesthetic and permeation of art by kitsch that are the hallmarks of advanced
capitalism. If in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” the breaking apart of unity
was accorded an important political and conceptual task, throughout the s
and s, the situation would change drastically.
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 71
Nearing the end of “Voyage on the North Sea” and in the articles on “reinventing
the medium” that follow, the changed status of fragmentation in Krauss’
thought becomes clear.
In “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph,”
a  essay on James Coleman, she writes:
It is at this historical juncture that the taboo against specificity comes to seem less and
less radical and a desire to rethink the idea of the medium as a form of resistance to
late capitalism’s utter generalization of the aesthetic – so that anything from shopping
to watching wars on television takes on an aestheticized glow – seems less and less
impossible.
This desire to recuperate the unity of a medium and the possibilities for selfreflexivity
therein must be read against the pervasiveness of installation art in
the s and s, as well as the increasing spectacularization of contemporary
art and the museum space. At stake here is an attempt to revive a critical
practice thought to be neutralized by the once-productive contaminations of
high and low, inside and outside.
If, in the s, Allan Kaprow could triumphantly proclaim that, “Young artists
of today no longer say, ‘I am a painter,’ or ‘a poet’ or ‘a dancer.’ They are
simply ‘artists.’ All of life will be open to them,” by the s, this attempt to
reinject art into everyday life had shifted to the postmodern complicity of art,
capital, and mass culture.
The “postmodernism of resistance” has been coopted
by a movement of capital that functions not according to principles of
unity and identity, but instead according to fragmentation and difference –
those very keywords poststructuralists once championed as providing a philosophical
corrective to the centuries-old hegemony of binary, rationalist
thought.
In , Godard dedicated his Masculine Feminine (Masculin
féminin:  faits précis) to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” but now
one might say that today’s children are borne of Deleuze and Starbucks – alive
amidst paradoxical flows of deterritorialization, personalization, and niche
marketing.
Krauss’ repugnance at such a configuration is palpable, to the
point that she has spoken of not being able to maintain her earlier methodological
commitment to poststructuralism and has made blanket statements as problematic
as calling “the international fashion of installation and intermedia
work” a situation in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization
of the image in the service of capital.”
Krauss’ response to such a situation
is a call to “reinvent” the medium.
How might one situate the relationship between mm gallery practice, medium
specificity, and obsolescence in relation to the twin debates of convergence
and the post-medium condition, both of which speak of specificity’s undoing?
These conditions have led to the relative denigration of the term
“medium specificity,” relegating it to nothing more than a specter of modernism
72 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
with little relevance for the contemporary moment. Writing on Tacita Dean in
an essay whose title misleadingly suggests a particular concern with the medium,
Michael Newman proposes that,
The issue is no longer how to distinguish mediums from each other or different uses
of a medium within a given state of technological development (as in the relation
between cinema and artists’ films in the s), but rather of whether a medium as such
is even possible in the context of the technological transformation – specifically the
digitalisation of media as a whole.
Paul Arthur, speaking as a part of a round table on obsolescence and American
avant-garde film, voices a similar position:
When you have first-generation film purists like Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Jonas
Mekas, Ernie Gehr, Bruce Baillie, Andrew Noren, Peter Hutton, and Gunvor Nelson
all working in video; and you have younger-generation filmmakers like Peggy
Ahwesh and Scott Stark who move back and forth between digital and film; and
you’ve got Stan Brakhage willing to commit his precious hand-painted films to VHS
for distribution, it seems to me that the notion of medium specificity is somewhat
vitiated.
Both of these proclamations miss how the twin phenomena of the post-medium
condition and convergence might lead not to the obliteration of specificity but
rather back to a rethinking of the concept that would free it of its modernist
shackles and render it relevant to the contemporary moment. Today, it is precisely
these admixtures of film and video, these dispersals of cinema beyond
what is considered to be its “normal” bounds, that necessitate rethinking how
medium specificity might operate.
Instead of shoring itself up from contamination in an essential purity, it is
now possible to see the medium as delimiting itself precisely in relation to the
aggregate mixtures it enters into with other media. This phenomenon is not
new: as Tom Gunning describes it, “[C]inema has always (and not only at its
origin) taken place within a competitive media environment, in which the survival
of the fittest was in contention and the outcome not always clear.”
But
certainly, the contemporary moment brings this “battle of the images,” to use
Raymond Bellour’s term, to a rather exacerbated degree unknown during the
decades when the constitutive heterogeneity of the cinematic apparatus was
relatively reined in by the hegemony of the cooperating systems of representation
and exhibition that find their canonical formulation in Jean-Louis Baudry’s
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.”
The entrenchment
of this situation in , when Baudry published the essay, was so firm as
to appear as mythologized nature. As such, the political imperative of the time
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 73
was to dismantle such unity, to make evident the work of the apparatus and
thereby provoke an Althusserian “knowledge effect.”
With the erosion of this hegemony, the situation has changed. Now, in a horizontally
integrated industry, one confronts the aggregate character of the cinema
everywhere, reaching as far as the marketing of fast-food tie-ins or the
downloading of companion short films online.
The objective now becomes
less a destruction of unity – for fragmentation is presumed to be the point of
departure – and more a salvaging of the remnants of an object become precious,
recollecting (assembling again and remembering) the cinema through an interrogation
of its elements. This is to insist first on the historical variability of film’s
medium specificity rather than on an enduring essence, and second on the gallery
as a space where an interrogation into the cinema’s component parts and
conventions might occur. If an artist chooses to move back and forth between
film and video, this should not be taken as a mark of indifference to the medium,
but rather as an effort to engage the medium most suited for the work,
thereby necessarily engaging its specific qualities. It is common for artists who
use mm in the gallery to engage in a certain medium promiscuity: to draw
but two examples from artists who will be discussed in this chapter, Tacita
Dean works in drawing, photography, books, found objects, sound, film, and
video; Matthew Buckingham works in film, video, photography, slide projection,
sculpture, installation. Far from vitiating the notion of the medium, such
cross-medium practices provide a new way of thinking about medium specificity,
one that sees it as in a constant interaction with the flows of convergence.
This dialectic of convergence and specificity calls for, following Bellour, the
necessity of “grasping all the arts as part of one single ensemble and analyzing
each work in terms of its mix of different art forms, particularly in terms of
media, or the artist’s choice of confining oneself to one mechanism alone.”
The contemporary climate of convergence makes possible an understanding of
medium specificity that does not rely on the old fiction of the purity of media,
but instead begins from the premise of interpenetration and contamination. It
begins from the notion that, as André Bazin acknowledged over fifty years ago,
film is and always has been an “impure art.”
Bellour has written, “The most twentieth-century form of art, [the cinema] is
at once more crowded-in now than ever and more alone in its splendour.”
It is
a formulation that points to the tendency to see articulations of medium specificity
appear precisely during those moments when limits or boundaries are
being compromised and/or drawn. It is an understanding of medium specificity
that sees it as produced out of an historical situation of heterogeneity and conflict.
Even Bazin, so often mistakenly held up as an example of the presumed
essentialism of classical film theory, emphasized that, “...we must say of the
cinema that its existence precedes its essence; even in his most adventurous ex-
74 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
trapolations, it is this existence from which the critic must take his point of de-
parture.”
As the cinema’s existence changes, so will conceptions of what is
specific to it. Once again, it is best to follow Bazin’s advice: “So let us stop appealing
to precedents from the origin of cinema and let us take up again the problem
as it seems to confront us today.”
Indexing the Past
Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, Untitled ().
Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij’s Untitled () is a silent mm film
consisting of a single ten-minute-long take of the Karet Bivak Cemetery in central
Jakarta. The static frame captures no more movement than the continual
rustling of the trees and a tiny lone figure wandering through the middle
ground about halfway through. The stillness of the cemetery is overlooked by
the high-rise buildings in the background, evidence of the rapid development
affecting the twenty-three million inhabitants of Indonesia’s capital city. The unbroken
continuity of the long take is riven by a temporal discontinuity within
the image, as tradition and modernity meet from background to foreground.
Indeed, the cemetery would have been demolished to make way for new construction
long ago, but owes its continued existence to housing the grave of Ibu
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 75
Fatmawati Sokarno, who was both the wife of Sokarno, the first president of
Indonesia, and the mother of Megawati Sukarnoputri, who served as the first
female president of the country from -. Sokarno lobbied for independence
from the Netherlands and presided over the country during the first turbulent
years of national sovereignty, with his wife reportedly sewing the first
Indonesian flag. As the image of the gravesite of this first first lady, Untitled
invokes not only the contemporary geopolitical resonances of globalization but
the history of colonialism as well – all within a meditation on finitude. This is a
concern the film shares with de Rijke and de Rooij’s Bantar Gebang (),
another single ten-minute take, this time of a slum near a garbage dump on the
outskirts of Jakarta.
Untitled recalls the travel genre of early cinema, a form of filmmaking that
promised its viewer not simply visual pleasure but also knowledge or possession
of the faraway lands depicted onscreen. However, instead of supplying its
viewer with any sense of possession or understanding, Untitled withholds information
or facts in favor of a brute encounter with time. Recalling the experiments
in filmic duration undertaken by Andy Warhol between  and ,
throughout the ten minutes of Untitled, details proliferate, yielding more and
more visual data that never resolve into a stable meaning. Rather than using the
extension of time to provide the viewer with an increased understanding of the
subject, as Untitled progresses, the possibility of knowledge is increasingly
undermined. As curator Jessica Morgan has written, “Knowing that the artists
are Dutch, we assume a post-colonial interest on their behalf. The impenetrable
flatness of the image, however, suggests that this observational investigation of
a former colony remains a halted quest for understanding.”
Key here is an investment in the powers of registration possessed by the film
image. De Rijke and de Rooij insist on the employment of celluloid, a choice one
must take seriously and pursue to its fullest implications.
The artists refuse to
overwrite the time of the apparatus (the spooling of film through the projector)
and the time of reception (the experience of the spectator) with the time of narrative,
a strategy that Peter Gidal sees as central to Warhol’s Blow Job ().
For Gidal, narrative – however fragmentary it might be – obliterates time: “the
real substance of what’s being shown on film is overtaken by what it ‘stands for’
or ‘represents.’”
For Gidal, this means that radical filmmaking must trouble
film’s representational capacity by insisting on the materiality of the image; it
should document nothing. De Rijke and de Rooij’s intervention is to follow
Gidal’s call to insist on the time of reception while still maintaining an investment
in the referentiality of the image, something structural film’s investigations
into medium specificity occluded in the emphasis on film as material. For Ina
Blom, de Rijke and de Rooij’s “self-effacing structures serve to deflect attention
from the work and onto the context or conditions of viewing itself,” putting the
76 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
filmmakers very firmly within lineage of structural film.
However, as much as
de Rijke and de Rooij engage this legacy, they also break apart from it by insisting
on the historicity of the film image. Untitled puts forth a notion of cinema
as an archive of chance, registering mute contingencies, pointing to a referent
that it can never quite summon to presence. One can see this pointing to the
profilmic real, but the film’s blockage, its “halted quest for understanding,” also
points to the unrepresentable forces of global capital, extending from colonial
domination to today’s transnational flows of labor, information, and power.
The Real is summoned by the image but cannot be spoken by it.
This notion of the medium as linked to both contingency and historicity invokes
the concept of indexicality, a category that has come to achieve crucial
importance in recent film-theoretical discussions of the analogue-digital transition.
Against the much-feared capacity for manipulation that resides in the binary
basis of digital media, the idea of analogue film as an indexical sign invokes
a testimonial power and a sense of historicity that are seen to be
weakened – if not obliterated entirely – by new media. As Mary Ann Doane
has ventured, “One might go so far as to claim that indexicality has become today
the primary indicator of cinematic specificity.”
This is to suggest a very
different relationship to the category of medium specificity, which has traditionally
been paired with an emphasis on the autonomy of the work of art. Greenberg’s
suggestion that the medium engage in self-criticism so as to further entrench
itself in its area of competence is a turning away from the outside world
towards self-referentiality.
By drawing attention to the material attributes of cinema – the surface of the
filmstrip, the single-frame articulation, sprocket holes, zoom, pan – s structural
film located film’s specificity in the materiality of the apparatus turning in
on itself, not in its ability to register a trace of pastness. With structural film,
medium specificity is grounded in film’s ability to become about itself, achieving
autonomy from that which would contaminate it. Now, on the contrary,
film’s medium specificity lies in its ability to point beyond itself, in the assertion
of its radical lack of autonomy by indexing the past. Recent theory and practice
have shifted to see this inscription of time as central to a historicized ontology of
the cinema. Just as Tacita Dean asserted that the material of celluloid had a
privileged relation to capturing chance occurrence in The Green Ray, Untitled
mobilizes a conception of filmic specificity that has to do with a registration of
duration that will allow for the materialization of contingency.
Even if photography’s truth claims have always been questionable, the contemporary
desires invested in the revelatory capacities of celluloid must be taken
seriously as symptomatic of the current state of technological change and
the anxieties that surround it. Dismissing them as factually erroneous does not
reduce their affective resonance, as they participate in a fetishistic regime of
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 77
belief rather than knowledge. The concept of disavowal has a long history in
film theory, invoked in the s as a way of conceptualizing the spectator’s
willingness to suspend disbelief and invest in the impression of reality.
Now,
however, the complex machinations of disavowal structure a quasi-mystical investment
in the powers of the analogue image: “I know very well (that photographs
have always been doctored and the digital can also tell the truth), but all
the same (I am drawn to analogue images, for the force of time present within
them, I can’t explain it, it just feels different)...” A knowledge of how the image is
produced forms the ground of a complex structure of disavowal and belief that
must be taken seriously and understood historically.
For Doane, indexicality is a profoundly historical category that designates
“the promise of the rematerialization of time” – an intense desire provoked in
part by the abstraction of the subject’s relation to time following the standardizing
processes of industrial modernity.
If the late nineteenth century witnessed
a profound reconfiguration of the subject’s relationship to time, the emergence
of networked electronic communications in the s and s may be seen as
another such shift. Paul Virilio hyperbolically speaks of the “globalization of
time, more precisely, the advent of universal, REAL TIME that has recently abolished
the primacy of local time,” while Geert Lovink quotes Jean Baudrillard as
proclaiming that “‘Time itself, lived time, no longer has time to take place,’” and
continues to explain that, “In this pathology of postmodernity, the Internet is no
doubt the epiphany of the real-time power.”
Electronic media allow for an
asymptotic approach to the simultaneous, linking disparate spaces across global
networks in the perpetual present of online communication. Data is encoded in
a regularized series of ones and zeros very different from the photograph’s enigmatic
status as a “message without a code.”
In relation to such present-tense
mapping, it is understandable that the cinema’s alignment with the archivization
of traces of pastness and chance events will be seized upon as central to its
specificity, for it offers a temporal regime and a system of signification at once
older and different. Though the new media dream of being everywhere at once,
all of the time (a desire driving the narrative of contemporary techno-thrillers
such as The Bourne Ultimatum []), and might be able to capture amateur
footage of an event even before the arrival of news crews, the promise of cinema
is a promise of historicity. It is a pact to bear witness to the haunting of the
present by the past. As Philip Rosen has written, “The indexical trace is a matter
of pastness. This already makes it appear that the image is in some way ‘histori-
cal.’”
As such, discourses that attempt to minimize the analogue-digital difference
through a rhetoric of perceptual realism are misguided since they wrongly
assume that the most important power of photography is that of spatial sem-
blance.
78 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
The question of spectatorial affect is central here. Just as Dean saw The
Green Ray as being about faith and belief in what one sees, it must be underlined
that though the category of indexicality is used to designate a particular
regime of the sign linked to the materiality of celluloid, its mobilization cannot
be confined to this material level alone. For, following Bazin and Barthes, the
power of the index must be understood as a relation to the spectator bound up
in time, desire, and finitude. Heidegger suggested that, “The essence of technology
is nothing technological,” meaning that technologies cannot be understood
in terms of their functionality but must instead be understood in terms of their
culturally produced meanings and usages.
The same is true of indexicality.
The index is a matter of discourse as much as of the mute registration of the
real. It is the pathos of the index, the affect of the trace that is now summoned
by the film image. Cinema’s specificity once lay in the illusory presence of the
objects onscreen, perhaps most embodied in the apocryphal story of credulous
early spectators recoiling at the oncoming train.
Now, however, one witnesses
a shift – from presence to absence, from life to death. Tombstones populate the
visual field of Untitled, but the film’s eerie stillness equally lends the work a
sense of mortification. The film’s taciturnity directs attention back onto the conditions
of viewing, inducing a reflection on mortality. Not just the temporality
of the image, but the apparatus itself contributes here to the sense of the stubborn
resistances of the past, the persistent fascination of the ruin. Becoming
quiet, becoming venerated, mm film is employed here as a reminder of novelty
grown old. It evinces the sadness of acknowledging that all that once was
modern will be tempered by time’s senescence.
In the mm film For Bas Oudt (Voor Bas Oudt, ), de Rijke and de
Rooij train their camera on the quivering wings of a butterfly in a Dutch zoo for
ninety seconds before ending abruptly, dedicating the result to Bas Oudt, their
former teacher at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. Shot with a boroscope, a
lens possessing powers of extreme magnification usually used for scientific purposes,
the film captures a fleeting moment that Vanessa Joan Müller has linked
to vanitas, a genre of Northern European still-life painting with a strong relation
to death. Latin for “emptiness” and “vanity,” vanitas is related to the transitory
and the lack of meaning in earthly life. Traditionally, a vanitas painting would
depict objects such as rotting fruit, drooping flower petals, skulls, or watches –
all of which testify to the impermanence of things. Müller writes, “The butterfly
is reminiscent of the impossibility of eternity and of eternal entropy. It celebrates
the transitory moment and also reflects in this transitoriness the passing time
documented by the shortness of the film.”
Thus, the film both archives the
passing moment and insists that it has been lost forever, now available only as
a flickering specter. The filmic image takes over from the vanitas genre of painting
as the memento mori of modernity. The thematics of ephemerality and loss
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 79
are here mobilized at the level of form and content, making the deceptively
modest Voor Bas Oudt into a powerful meditation on both the materiality of
film and the passing of time.
In the films of de Rijke and de Rooij, one finds a relation to temporality and to
history that stands against a notion of easy image consumption and the delivery
of information able to be apprehended in an instant. Any security of interpretation
is undone. The butterfly of For Bas Oudt passes by too quickly, while the
graveyard image of Untitled lasts and lasts but never yields to the viewer’s
gaze. De Rijke and De Rooij have described the contemporary situation of image
consumption and easily given meanings with vitriol: “Images are being
used as garbage. People don’t even look at them... It is also our task to protect
the images we make from over-exposure, and our public from their self-imposed
visual bulimia.”
While one might question the self-imposition of this
bulimia, the point is well taken. Once the province of shock and distraction,
once aligned with the speed of the modern city, here cinema is mobilized as a
site of aesthetic contemplation. If Barthes saw cinema as rushing by too fast, as
lacking the “engorgement” of time one finds in photography, one must see the
slowness of a film like Untitled as rendering unto cinema something of the
contemplative temporality of stillness Barthes prized so much in photography.
This strategy is compounded by the strict regulations de Rijke and de Rooij
impose for the screening of their films. Unlike most moving image artists, the
duo insists that their films be exhibited in custom-designed spaces at particular
screening times. The projector is enclosed in a soundproof booth and any potential
distraction is minimized. Describing these rooms as “minimal sculptures,”
de Rijke and de Rooij are interested in the vacancy resulting from the span of
time between projections, when the room will be white and empty.
In a visual
culture – both inside the gallery and out – that is predicated on the perpetual
availability of images, this withholding is crucial. With screening times posted
outside of the room, the viewer is expected to sit, wait for the film to start, and
stay until its end. T.J. Clark has put forth that “one kind of corrective to dogma
is looking itself, pursued long enough.”
To propose such a relationship between
the duration of perception and a politics of the image is to reconfigure
the maligned name of contemplation. If absorption was once a quality of bourgeois
aesthetics to be overthrown in the name of distanciation, in the contemporary
media environment, its valence has changed. Through his sustained examination
of Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c.,
National Gallery, London) and Landscape with a Calm (-, Getty Museum,
Los Angeles) – which, interestingly enough, is also a consideration of the
memento mori – Clark forges a chronopolitics of image consumption for the digital
age, specifically around the refusal of easily apprehended meaning. He
writes,
80 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
...our present means of image-production strike me as...an instrumentation of a certain
kind of language use: their notions of image clarity, image flow, image depth, and
image density are all determined by the parallel (unimpeded) movement of the logo,
the brand name, the product slogan, the compressed pseudo-narrative of the TV commercial,
the sound bite, the T-shirt confession, the chat show q. & a. Billboards, web
pages, and video games are just projections – perfections, perfected banalizations – of
this half-verbal exchange. They are truly (as their intellectual groupies go on claiming)
a “discourse” – read a sealed echo-chamber of lies.
If Screen theory insisted on viewing cinema as a language, the more recent turn
to Peircian semiotics in theories of indexicality shows what might be gained by
expanding our apprehension of the cinematic image beyond a linguistic framework:
a conception of the image as never exhausted by linguistic meaning and
at times resistant to it.
In Untitled, de Rijke and de Rooij combine two temporal strategies: the exploitation
of film’s indexicality and an insistence on long duration. Using these
two elements together, the artists engage in kenosis – an emptying of meaning –
that questions the violence that underlies the assumption of easy understanding.
By positing the possibility of unknowing through an insistence on the mute
facticity of the filmic image, de Rijke and de Rooij revive a Warholian interest in
obstinate stupidity within an inquiry on the vicissitudes of cross-cultural understanding
and global image circulation. In his text on the neutral, Barthes has
written, “[A]s we know, Nietzsche linked meaning and power: meaning (fruit
of, called by interpretation) always a blow of force. à In radical terms: no solution
to arrogance other than the suspension of interpretation, of meaning.”
De
Rijke and de Rooij reject the easy availability of the billboard, the commercial,
and the logo in favor of a different relationship to pastness, historicity, speed,
and attention. This is, however, a new place for cinema: it is a position suffused
with slowness, sadness, and death. It emerges as a contestation of the frenetic
montage aesthetics of contemporary mass media, using the controlled environment
of the gallery against mainstream commercial filmmaking. But one might
also view such usage as a quiet outcry against the politics of image consumption
within the gallery walls, using film against the flashy overload of installation-entertainment.
The artists stake out a small place for a different kind of
filmmaking between the spectacular poles of mall multiplex and blockbuster
exhibition.
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 81
A Little History of 16mm
“Every move a picture, every man his own movie director, every lawn a movie
studio, and every home a movie theater.”
So begins the first mention of mm
film in the New York Times, on  January . Kodak introduced the gauge that
year in an attempt to bolster amateur filmmaking, expanding markets from
commercial exhibition to enthusiasts who would require cameras, film stock,
and projectors to support their new hobby. For indeed, as Haidee Wasson remarks,
though the name of mm may refer to the measurement of the filmstrip,
“it was more accurately an expansive network of ideas and practices.”
The ideas and practices formed around this cheaper, more accessible alternative
to the industry standard of mm stock have, throughout various points in its
history, included not only amateur filmmaking, but also other venues of nontheatrical
exhibition, such as classrooms and film societies.
But perhaps above
all, mm has been the favored gauge of experimental cinema. The smaller
gauge and ease of operating the camera facilitates the sense of a personal cinema
of single authorship, held against the great orchestrations of Hollywood
production methods. Moreover, mm provided the avant-garde with an economic
choice. Though by no means cheap, the format provided a viable choice
for filmmakers and exhibitors working under strained financial circumstances
while retaining an excellent image quality.
With some exceptional employments of mm and mm, mm has become
standard gauge for gallery filmmaking.
Though mm was not invented until
 – well into the industrialization of cinema – its affiliation with an artisanal
mode of production makes it a favored material support for a return to the
modest origins of the medium. This is exemplified by the mm work of Matthew
Buckingham, who uses the medium to interrogate microhistories of modernity,
including that of the cinema. Beginning with Amos Fortune Road
(), in which Buckingham moves between the present of a young woman’s
summer in New Hampshire and the enduring past of slavery, the artist marks
out an interest that unifies his broad body of work: he encounters traces left by
the past and narrativizes them according to the exigencies of the present. Installations
such as Subcutaneous () and Muhheakantuck: Everything Has
a Name () use film in conjunction with an interest in the “little history”: the
narratives that get left out of the official story, the fragmentary slices of the past
that persist into the present in the form of heavily cathected traces.
The notion of the “little history” is equally a reference to Walter Benjamin’s
 text, “Little History of Photography.”
Here, Benjamin returns to the beginnings
of photography, looking at long-exposure portraiture to attempt to understand
the fascination of the medium prior to its large-scale industrialization.
82 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
He brings together a certain notion of historiography with the proposition of the
“optical unconscious,” a term used to designate the new realms of visibility
opened by the camera. The historiographic impulse of the “Little History” is to
return to a moment in the past in an effort to recover the utopian potential that
was held therein but dissipated by the passage of time. This unsettles any notion
of historical necessity, reintroducing the centrality of contingency and posing
the possibility of alternate, unfulfilled futures – but it also imparts a sense of
finitude and the horror of time’s impassive march. This constellation of hope
and death, history and subjectivity – glimpsed everywhere throughout the writer’s
oeuvre – accounts for the importance of photography.
Benjamin posits a homology between what he views as the historiographical
imperative and the medium-specific characteristics of photography, with contingency
emerging as a category vital to both. The advent of technological media,
while compromising tradition and taking part in the dissolution of Erfahrung,
or long experience, also provided a new opportunity to interrogate the
past and negotiate the relationship between subjectivity and modernity. Discussing
a photo Karl Dauthendey took of himself and his fiancée, Benjamin remarks
that in old photographs,
the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of
contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the
subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten
moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.
This tiny spark of contingency, conceptualized in the preceding section according
to the notion of the indexical trace, is here linked to a new way of understanding
history. To rediscover in the image the forgotten future so that what is
found there might be put in the service of the present: this emerges as a paramount
concern in two Buckingham film installations that deal explicitly with
narratives of film history and with film as a medium intimately bound to historicity,
Situation Leading to a Story () and False Future ().
In Situation Leading to a Story, Buckingham returns to the culture of amateur
filmmaking initiated by the advent of mm. As the viewer enters the gallery,
no image is visible – a mm projector occupies the room and a male narrator
can be heard through speakers. Not the image, but its machinery: in this,
the first work for which the artist specified installation instructions, the projector
appears as sculptural object before the viewer is introduced to the image.
While it is not divested of its utility, still functioning to emit an image, this becoming-sculpture
of the projector puts forth the technology as an object of aesthetic
contemplation, much like Simon Starling’s Wilhelm Noack oHG ()
and Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall/Victoria  (). While Starling references
the thwarted utopia where modernism and industry might meet through
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 83
a Moholy-Nagy-inspired projector, Graham has described his installation as
“two obsolete technologies facing off,” the projector and the typewriter.
In all
three works, the projector remains in use but acts as more than just the material
support for an artist’s film. Framed by the gallery walls, it emerges from its
normally hidden position in a soundproof booth to command the viewer’s attention
as a sculptural form in its own right, distinctly aligned with the outmoded.
In Buckingham’s installation, one must leave the room and reenter
around the corner in order to gain access to the image, suggesting a process of
work to find the image, a labor of access.
Simon Starling, Wilhelm Noack oHG ().
Over jerky, hand-held black-and-white footage of a garden party from decades
ago, a voice-over tells a story of finding four rolls of mm on the street in Manhattan.
Each roll was labeled with a single word: “garden,” “Peru,” “garage,”
and “Guadalajara.” The image track of Situation Leading to a Story consists
of this mm footage, reprinted, as Buckingham’s voice-over explains, so as to
be able to be projected at sound speed without making the motion look jerky.
Buckingham’s final comment on this printing process, “Later I wondered if I’d
slowed it down too much,” might merely be indicative of a perfectionist’s dissatisfaction,
but it also invokes the eerie slowness of found-footage films like
Angela Ricci-Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian’s From the Pole to the Equator
(Dal polo all’equatore, ) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (), which ex-
84 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
ploit optical printing as a way of instilling an increased fascination with the
aged celluloid image. But despite this commonality, Situation Leading to a
Story must be distinguished from such works, for it not only makes use of
found footage, but also directly interrogates the processes of finding and making
sense of such images of the past. As Mark Godfrey suggests, “It could be
said that Buckingham provides a metacritique of the indulgent use of found
imagery in recent art practice in Situation, and by taking found film as a site,
relinquishes a formalist investigation for an institutional one.”
Whereas
Decasia presents a kind of fantasia of the archive, with footage drawn from
organizations all over the world according to formal interest, it is not just the
fetishized material of celluloid that figures in Situation (although this is very
much at play). Rather, one witnesses an investigation into the different uses and
functions of mm film throughout its history and the particular challenges that
this body of often orphaned images poses today. The artist plays archivist-detective
with this footage: he dates it according to the codes found along the
edges of the filmstrip (a practice Kodak instated in ), grapples with the
onset of vinegar syndrome, and attempts to find its owner based on the name
and address on the box that contained the reels.
Matthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story ().
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 85
The particular “situation” of an artist finding discarded film leads to a “story,”
or to be more precise, to many stories. For throughout the twenty minutes of the
film, Buckingham weaves a polyphony of voices and temporalities that crisscross
modalities of discourse from histories of exploitation, to film preservation,
the detective story, and the poetic meditation – none of which engage what has
emerged as the “official” history of cinema. No studios, no stars, no auteurs.
The film labeled “Peru” documents the construction of a tramway in the Andes
Mountains. This leads Buckingham to relate the story of how the Cerro de Pasco
Copper Corporation (CPC), owned by a group of New York industrialists, polluted
and devalued the land in its  consolidation of a monopoly over
mining in Peru. In the years that followed, the CPC entered into a series of
clashes with revolutionary governments, striking workers, and American antitrust
laws that led to the eventual nationalization of the corporation in ,
when it was purchased from its American owners at a price overvalued for
mines that had nearly been sucked dry. This story stands next to information
about the introduction of the mm camera, which we learn was first available
only as a package including tripod, screen, splicer, and projector, appearing
only five years before Ford’s Model T car and costing only seventy dollars less.
As the voice-over states,
Despite the relatively high price, there were , home-movie makers in the United
States six years after the camera was introduced. As a guide and inspiration to
these new hobbyists Kodak published a book titled How to Make Good Movies...The
book also advises the reader to “make your movie camera the family historian,” and
later makes this enigmatic warning to filmmakers: “your movie camera exists to preserve
life, not to destroy it.”
“To preserve life, not to destroy it.” While the second clause of this sentence is
rather enigmatic, indeed, film’s mandate to preservation emerges as central to
Situation Leading to a Story, spanning across public and private domains so
as to archive instances of colonial exploitation alongside the leisure time of the
bourgeoisie. The preservation of life – rather than the creation of fictional spectacle
– is here put forth as the forgotten vocation of film, echoing Jean-Luc Godard’s
contention in Histoire(s) du cinéma (-) that the cinema betrayed
itself by turning away from its ability to document the world and towards stories
of a girl and a gun.
In Situation Leading to a Story, the voice-over posits that this mandate is
explicitly in conflict with narrative:
Narrative is a chain of events in cause and effect relationship occurring in time and
space. The plot of a narrative is selected from the events of a story, which, in turn,
have been selected from experience, ordering time and erasing contingency. But in
home movies a minute is really a minute, there is no condensation or ordering of
86 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
time, no selection of plot from story, just a few hyper-quotidian moments, banal activities
performed only because there is a camera there recording them.
Buckingham seconds Doane’s assertion that while the early cinema allowed for
“the ceaseless production of meaning out of contingency,” with the development
of narrative, cinematic time is “troped,” made plastic by the development of
editing, and subverted to the needs of the storytelling.
Amateur filmmaking
provides Buckingham with a place to excavate the persistence of an earlier temporal
economy that had not yet abolished the time of the apparatus with that of
the diegesis.
Situation Leading to a Story unfolds how this archive of past contingencies
enters into relations with the present moment. The voice-over mediates the
viewer’s experience of these images in the light of the present condition of
mm film and the historical distance of the moment of recording. There is an
interrogation of the impossible desire to recover the moment of inscription,
when trace and referent would be united in an experience of presence. This recalls
archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai’s notion of the “Model Image,” a theoretical
fiction that posits the image at the moment of creation.
Usai’s description of
the task of film history with regard to this Model Image might very well be that
of Situation Leading to a Story:
The ultimate goal of film history is an account of its own disappearance or its transformation
into another entity. In such a case, a narrating presence has the prerogative
of resorting to the imagination to describe the phases leading from the hypothetical
Model Image to the complete oblivion of what the moving image once represented.
Stumbling on this footage on a street corner, Buckingham must reconstitute its
history through narrativization and imagination, so as to telescope “then” and
“now” to produce an alternative film history. Buckingham playfully uses the
French maintenant to describe the fantasy of recovering the moment of inscription,
for it links the category of the “now” to the hand of the camera operator.
As the voice-over states, maintenant is “derived from the Latin manutenere, to
support or sustain, which in turn comes from manus, or hand, and tenere, to
hold. Maintenant: to hold in the hand, hand-held.” The hand holding the camera
becomes a metonym for the body present before the event. The desire for presence
but the simultaneous acknowledgement that its achievement would require
reversing the passage of time – an impossibility – is what suffuses the
film image with its particular commingling of desire and melancholy. When not
transported into the otherworldly fantasies of narrative film, the viewer remains
caught between this desire for the rematerialization of the past and his or her
firm emplacement in the present, ever fleeing into the future, farther and farther
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 87
away from the distant event captured on film. There is no illusion of presence,
but merely a lingering trace.
As if to compensate for not being able to recover the moment of registration,
Buckingham instead seeks to find the man whose name was written on the box
of film. Since he cannot unearth the filming body, the main/tenant, the hand that
held in the now, perhaps he can at least recover the main jettant, the hand that
threw the film away, and somehow take account of the time of the film’s oblivion.
After finally tracking down one Mr. Harrison Dennis through a quest spanning
from New York City to Ossining, the narrator calls the man on the telephone
only to find that Mr. Dennis doesn’t remember throwing away any reels
of film. The narrator wishes to describe the films to him, to tell the story of
where he found them and how he tracked down their possible owner – in short,
to describe the situation that led to this story by communing over the collective
memory found in these reels, the stories dormant in the moss of time that has
grown over these images. But Mr. Dennis has no interest and is eager to get off
of the phone, bringing the detective story of ownership that runs throughout
Situation Leading to a Story to a conclusion.
It is, however, a conclusion that lacks fulfillment. Tacita Dean has written that
Situation Leading to a Story “is about revelation: revealing the intimacies of
the anonymous other.”
However, one must note that, just as with de Rijke and
de Rooij’s Untitled, there is an acknowledgment that this revelation both will
and will not take place. Yes, film will grant access to the past, reveal the visible,
but it will never fully render it present, always imbuing it with a certain spectrality,
tempering the pleasure of resurrection with the ache of loss. In this context,
another remark of Dean’s is perhaps more apposite than the one she addresses
specifically to Situation: “Obsolescence has an aura: the aura of
redundancy and failure.”
While the notion of aura will be reprised in the
pages that follow, one must see Buckingham’s exploration of the history of
mm as an attempt to engage such failed futures so as to ignite new hope
while simultaneously giving rein to the sadness of disappearance. Redundancy
and failure are not cast away, but cultivated and mined for their generative potential.
In this way, Buckingham recalls Benjamin’s ambivalence around the
Dauthendey portrait as well as his assertion that the pathos of his Arcades Project
is that “there are no periods of decline.”
To reject the notion of decline is to
refuse a teleological conception of history as a narrative of progress, to dislodge
the sense that the present that exists is the only one that could be, and therefore
to reintroduce the centrality of contingency. For, if Guy Debord wrote that, “It is
a particular society, not a particular technology that has made cinema what it is.
Cinema could have been historical analyses, theories, essays, memories,” Buckingham
responds that yes – cinema could have been all of these things.
But in
88 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
the margins, it might have been so all along. And with some effort, perhaps it
still might be.
Buckingham has publicly discussed his interest in Benjamin:
There’s a notion that can be found in Walter Benjamin’s writing that is central to what
I try to work with. Benjamin describes the vanishing point of history as always being
the present moment. This formulation of history – thinking about the present moment
as the point where history vanishes – is a way of reversing the received notion of
history as vanishing somewhere behind us, vanishing into a nonexistent time, a time
that no longer exists...We are restaging those events here and now in order to think
about what’s happening here and now, to think about the present.
Matthew Buckingham, False Future ().
This impulse is particularly evident in Buckingham’s  mm installation,
False Future. Here, the artist explores the story of a man named Louis who
invented cinema. But no, not that Louis, brother of Auguste, but instead a littleknown
pioneer named Louis Le Prince who managed a panorama company
before trying his hand at the creation of moving images some five years before
the Lumières. He produced at least three films, each eight seconds long, before
mysteriously disappearing on a train leaving Dijon bound for Paris in .
Some suspected Edison. Like the disappearances of Amos Fortune Road and
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 89
Situation Leading to a Story, here once again Buckingham insists on the
story of a person disappearing with a trace. For even if Le Prince was never
found, he left behind his films, one of which is remade by Buckingham to form
the image-track of False Future. As the subtitled French voice-over relates, out
of the  frames that originally comprised Le Prince’s view of the Leeds Bridge
in Leeds, England, only twenty survive – roughly one second of projected film.
Instead of the great showing at the Salon Indien by the Lumières in , here
we learn of a false start of cinema, a beginning that wasn’t. The title comes from
the French verb tense the “faux futur,” used in historical narration to anticipate
the events of the past as if they were yet to occur.
This is a false future for it
returns the listener to a present of the past to look forward to a future that has in
fact already been played out and is hence no longer a true future. Much like the
desire in Situation to return to the present of inscription, here too Buckingham
investigates the affects of historicity. Buckingham returns to the birth of cinema
not as an easy return to origins but as an attempt to show the difficultly of easily
determining such origins and to consider the ways in which the history of cinema
might have gone differently, to remember something of the great potential
the medium held at its beginnings. What would have been? What might have
been if the history of cinema had begun differently? Begun earlier?
The voice-over questions,
If Le Prince had survived, filmmaking might have begun five years before it did. In
those five years what moving images might have been made? Which ones would
have been preserved? Would we now be able to see motion pictures of the courtmartial
of Captain Dreyfus, or of the U.S. overthrow of indigenous rule in Hawaii?
The Elephant Man’s funeral? The massacre of the Lakota at Wounded Knee? Or nine
inches of snow falling on the city of New Orleans in February ? But perhaps there
are other ways to think of what might have been.
False Future is this other way. Buckingham suggests that it is not so much the
capturing of landmark historical events that is important, but rather the registration
of the banal, the quotidian. After opening the possibility of thinking
about the historical function of moving images differently, the voice-over describes
in detail the extant fragment of Le Prince’s film of the Leeds Bridge. We
receive a kind of inventory of occurrences: “These twenty frames show six
horse-drawn vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One wagon is loaded
with enormous bundles. Others carry passengers. On the far side of the street
fifteen people pass each other on the sidewalk. One disappears around a corner.
Two men cross the middle of the street diagonally,” and so on. One can count
and one can list, but this ekphrasis will never exhaust the image, nor will it ever
approximate its fascination, for it lacks its power of deathly resurrection. The
excessiveness of description here is an inscription of failure. But just like the
90 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
failure glimpsed at the end of Situation Leading to a Story, this failure is
paradoxically generative: it testifies to the specificity of cinema. It is what cannot
be spoken by such description, by the studium, that accounts for the desires
and anxieties invested in the film image.
False Future is a reopening of possibilities that had been closed down, a
reactivation of a mode of filmmaking dependent on the registration of contingency
over time. Even the installation specifications of the piece speak to Buckingham’s
desire to return to this other origin in the hope of setting in motion
another future. The film is projected onto a large white sheet, which the voiceover
tells us was the memory Le Prince’s daughter had of briefly glimpsing his
working quarters before being ushered out. The gallery is turned into a space of
experimentation and labor from the late nineteenth century, setting up a laboratory
of image-making that bypasses the stability of the movie theater, most often
thought of as the site of cinema. False Future is a resurrection of hope and
possibility at a time of tremendous anxiety over what will happen to the medium
in the years to come, releasing a utopian hope for celluloid film as it faces
obsolescence.
Ruinophilia
Linking together a discussion of medium specificity with obsolescence and the
work of Walter Benjamin inevitably invokes Rosalind Krauss’ triangulation of
such topoi near the end of “A Voyage on the North Sea.” As Krauss puts it,
That the cynical element gains the upper hand over the course of time goes without
saying. But Benjamin believes that at the birth of a given social form or technological
process the utopian dimension was present and, furthermore, that it is precisely at the
moment of obsolescence of that technology that it once more releases this dimension,
like the last gleam of a dying star. For obsolescence, the very law of commodity production,
both frees the outmoded object from the grip of utility and reveals the hollow
promise of that law.
The entirety of Benjamin’s Arcades Project involves an investigation of the material
culture of nineteenth-century Paris, an era vanishing by the time Benjamin
began writing. It is through an examination of the detritus of capitalism that
Benjamin would probe the debris of history and bring it into contact with the
present, where it could attain legibility in the now-time [Jetztzeit] of recognizability.
In this sense, Benjamin’s historiography manifests a great likeness to
Baudelaire’s description of the ragpicker, cited in the former’s essay, “The Paris
of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”:
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 91
Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything
that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has
scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates
the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects
judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the
shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaw of the goddess of Industry.
But rather than making the found objects useful once again within the context of
Industry, the ragpicker-historian embraces obsolescence as the dialectical other
of capitalism’s imperative to novelty, finding within this other side of the proverbial
coin the possibility that new relationships might be illuminated and the
profane redeemed.
This understanding of obsolescence is in many ways the primary theoretical
grounding of Krauss’ call to “re-invent the medium,” perhaps the dominant
way of considering medium specificity in contemporary art theory. This return
to medium specificity emerges against the backdrop of the rise of installation art
throughout the s and s, which, as noted above, Krauss sees as a disturbing
transformation of the post-medium condition. The critique of the medium
moves from an indictment of modernist essentialism to an uncritical indulgence
in late capitalist fragmentation. What is most at stake for Krauss in
this return to the medium is the generation of recursive structures, wherein certain
elements of the work engender rules that will govern the structure of that
work. By “recursive,” Krauss refers to a circular structure, whereby the work
refers back to itself in a reflexive manner, and then makes use of particular conventions
and limitations of the medium to generate parameters that will dictate
the form of the work.
Following Theodor Adorno much more than his dear friend Benjamin, this
notion aims at a reinvention of autonomy as the pathway towards imagining a
new and different conception of collectivity.
Here, the work is sealed off into a
spiral of self-interrogation that shores it up against the onslaught of kitsch –
perhaps an outdated term, but one that Krauss takes from Greenberg: “Kitsch
is vicarious experience and fake sensations. Kitsch changes according to style
but always remains the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the
life of our times.”
As Krauss explains, “In order to sustain artistic practice, a
medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions,
some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly
‘specific’ to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity.”
This experience
of necessity will not only provide a standard by which to judge the
work’s excellence, but will also ensure that it forms a monad capable of resisting
contamination. It is acknowledged that this unity can only be partial, or at best
provisional, for the medium as it is now conceived refuses the transparent self-
92 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
identity once accorded to modernist media. It cannot fully double back in a
perfect self-enclosure, for it is made up of aggregate parts and is acknowledged
to be self-differing. Nevertheless, it is the task of the artist to produce the greatest
possible recursivity, to aim at autonomy even if it cannot fully be achieved.
The notion of reinventing the medium is explicitly linked to technological obsolescence,
as it involves staking a claim on disused commodities as ground for
producing a renewed autonomy of art precisely through that which once compromised
it – as Krauss notes, photography was, after all, the serpent that entered
the Eden of artistic autonomy.
Now, over and above – or because of – a
support’s anchorage in mass culture and its ties to circulation, the successfully
reinvented medium withdraws a particular technology from mass culture and
forges for it an aesthetic system, sublating difference and shoring itself off from
the world through self-interrogation in order to fulfill what Krauss sees as the
desired function – namely, a commitment to an enduring modernism. James
Coleman is the exemplary artist here, as he makes use of a slide projector and
audio voice-over to produce narratives after the manner of the photo-novel. For
Krauss, it is key that both the slide projector and the photo-novel “point directly
to an internationalist commercialization of culture in advertising on the one
hand and a degraded form of literacy on the other.”
By forging self-reflexive
systems out of such outmoded mass cultural forms, Coleman glimpses the utopian
energy that may be released at the moment of technological obsolescence,
following Benjamin’s claim regarding the redemptive powers of the disused
commodity. However, Krauss notes that Coleman’s ability to invent a medium
also depends on the fact that the use of slides has “no aesthetic lineage and...is
so singular as a support that to adopt it as a medium is immediately to put a
kind of patent on it.”
Here, one witnesses an ex nihilo invention of a medium,
as the artist appropriates a mass cultural technology fallen into disuse to generate
recursive structures and “patent” the medium outside of any historical understanding
of its conventions.
This seals it off not only through self-interrogation,
but also through a certain ownership, as an invented medium may only
be practiced by one.
Here one finds a major difference between artists investigating the specificity
of film as an old medium and Krauss’ notion of reinvention. Crucially, film has
an aesthetic history, and a rich and varied one at that. Moreover, the interrogations
into medium specificity one finds in gallery film concertedly take up this
history. Works like Situation Leading to a Story and False Future interrogate
alternative film histories. The Green Ray and Untitled may avoid overt
reference to film history, but they do take care to locate themselves within a
historical tradition of reflections on the medium and its changing contours over
time, whether it be in Dean’s interrogation of the analogue-digital transition, or
de Rijke and de Rooij’s desire to situate their work amidst traditions of duraChapter
2 – Filmic Ruins 93
tion-based experimental filmmaking. Recursivity is not what is at stake in this
conception of medium specificity, even if the illuminated oblong windows of
Dean’s Bubble House mimic the film’s frame or the lighthouse of her Disappearance
at Sea references the mechanism of projection.
Rather, the conception of medium specificity put forth in these works is radically
anti-autonomous, interrogating the history of the medium and its historicity,
its function as archive and social technology. For Jacques Rancière, essentialist
conceptions of medium specificity such as Greenberg’s erase the relation
between images, the social, and the history of criticism. A medium is thus not a
“proper” means or material (i.e., flatness for painting) but instead a space of
conversion that articulates relations between visibility and intelligibility, seeing
and saying.
While Krauss rejects both the unity of the support and its status as
the sole determining instance of the medium’s essence, she remains prey to
Rancière’s quite valid criticism. For there is little place for the social and for the
history of criticism here; instead, the invention of the medium rests on the production
of a formalist unity that presents itself as a novelty without history that
is not unlike the commodity form itself – new, desired, and subject to private
ownership.
Krauss’ call to reinvent the medium follows the Benjaminian type of the collector,
he who orchestrates “the liberation of things from the drudgery of being
useful.”
Though aligned with the possibility of redeeming these fallen objects,
what must be emphasized is that, like so many of the figures that populate Benjamin’s
writing, the collector is a character marked by a profound ambivalence.
The collector detaches the object from its utility, but in doing so removes it from
history. Torn from context, the collected object enters a spatial organization frozen
in time. Calling the collection a “paradise of consumption,” Susan Stewart
describes it as “replac[ing] history with classification, with an order beyond tem-
porality.”
By insisting that the medium is reinvented ex nihilo without aesthetic
lineage, Krauss puts artists such as Coleman and Kentridge in such a position,
seeing them as redeeming superannuated technology through their care,
attention, and artistic insight, but disallowing any consideration of the ways in
which they engage the respective histories of the various media they invoke.
Benjamin describes the “most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects”
as “the struggle against dispersion,” a notion mirrored in the emphasis Krauss
places on the formation of a recuperative unity.
From the scattered remnants
of the world, the collector forges a coherent system and imposes it onto the
heterogeneity of objects so as to forge a new, totalizable system.
In opposition to the collector, Benjamin places the allegorist. While acknowledging
that, true to the antinomic patterns of his thought, “more important than
all the differences that may exist between them – in every collector hides an
allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector,” the allegorist is the “polar oppo-
94 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
site” of the collector, retaining the historical specificity of the detritus he or she
encounters but wrenching it from the continuum so as to make it enter relationships
– in the manner of cinematic montage – with other elements.
Michael
Newman has emphasized the centrality of the figure of the collector to Tacita
Dean’s work, making use of Benjamin’s theory of collecting to do so.
While
one cannot deny the collector’s impulse that underlies works such as Four,
Five, Six, and Seven Leaf Clover Collection (-present) and Die Regimentstochter
(), allegory rather than collection emerges as a more apposite
figure to describe the majority of the artist’s work, for it resists the freezing
of historical contingency into the synchronic time of the collector’s structure.
Rather, allegory allows for an understanding of the passage of objects through
time, as well as the historical and affective resonances that this entails.
The ruin is a central trope throughout Dean’s work, but figures especially
strongly in Bubble House, Fernsehturm, Kodak (), Palast, Section
Cinéma (), and Teignmouth Electron, all of which document physical
ruins of varying sorts through the ruined medium of film. Less than the “rescue”
of which Newman speaks, something that might be conceptualized as the
collector’s struggle against the dispersals of time, these films engage the pathos
of the ruin and the inevitability of entropic passage into relic, tracing the contours
of the dispersal rather than arresting it. The irreversible motion of time
cannot be stopped, and Dean does not attempt to do so. Rather, these ruins are
examined not in an attempt to halt decay but to interrogate how the disjunctive
temporalities that reside therein might produce a different understanding of the
present.
The allegorist is the reader of ruins, the excavator of the remnants of the past
in the light of the present. Unlike the collector, the allegorist does not attempt to
defeat time but instead interrogates nonsynchronous temporalities, confronting
head on the admixture of hope and dread that Benjamin read in the Dauthendey
portrait. In the Trauerspiel, Benjamin writes that “Allegories are, in the realm
of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things,” and it is precisely this relationship
– and not solely that of the collector – that must be summoned to deal
with the ways in which mm gallery practices mobilize notions of history and
obsolescence.
Here, the history of cinema is not a totalizable system, that great
dream of the collector in which every object would have its place and every
place would have its object. Rather, the cinema has been scattered, its legibility
as a coherent object fractured. It is amidst these ruins that the allegorist wanders,
producing provisional readings of what this constellation “cinema” might
be, probing to which anxieties it might respond, or which desires it might elicit.
This distinction between collection and allegory gets to the heart of how cinema
has been reconceptualized in recent gallery-based employments of analogue
film. While celluloid certainly functions as a technology of preservation in this
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 95
context, it would be naïve to see the fact of filming as having saved these objects
from the ruination of time. For cinema itself is, in Dean’s conception, a fragile
ruin; it is fit to capture such objects for it shares in their stature. There is an
acknowledgment that the desire to preserve for posterity is always haunted by
a destructiveness that lurks at the heart of the desire to conquer finitude.
Cinema
can reanimate life, but only as a ghostly apparition shot through with absence.
Death cannot be vanquished. Cinema, once “substitut[ing] for our gaze a
world that is better in line with our desires” and satiating the spectator with its
illusory plenitude, is now truly “death at work,” “death twenty-four times a
second.”
Nowhere does this changed status become so visible as in Kodak, which effectively
functions as an elegy for mm film, the very material that makes the
work possible. Here, Dean turns her camera on the Kodak factory in Chalonsur-Saône
after learning they were to halt production of mm and produce
only X-ray film. Using both black-and-white and color, Dean explores the luminosity
of celluloid through languorous takes. What appears at the beginning
of the film as a fully functioning factory has, by the film’s end, been emptied of
workers, some presumably soon to be without jobs. Industry has gone, but
Dean has stayed; with a gesture that might metonymically stand in for her practice
as a whole, here one glimpses the artist-as-lingerer amongst wreckage. The
last shots of the film show disused celluloid on a dirty floor, the vibrant purples
seen earlier in the film now grey and brown, ready to be swept into the garbage.
In Kodak – to say nothing of Noir et Blanc (), a four-and-a-half-minute
film shot with the remaining five rolls of Kodak film the artist had acquired
before it became unavailable – the history of cinema as art and industry is held
up as one of ruination. Yes – cinema can save, it can rescue. But throughout
Dean’s work, its fragility is underlined.
Cinema does not stand outside the
system of novelty and obsolescence, transcending the realm of objects with the
promise of preservation. Rather, like the Bubble House, abandoned by a French
owner convicted of embezzlement before its construction had been completed,
the cinema too is exposed to the rigors of time’s passing, abandoned by many
while its project remains unfinished. The technology of preservation is now in
need of preservation itself. In Dean’s employment of mm, a ruined medium
serves as medium for examining ruins rather than constructing a collection safe
from the degradation inherent in time.
In films such as Kodak, Palast, and Fernsehturm, the latter two of which
focus on the decaying monuments of the former German Democratic Republic,
thinking history outside of a narrative of progress is central. In Palast, Dean
languidly documents the Palast der Republik on the bank of the Spree near Museum
Island in Berlin, slated for destruction by German parliament in .
The building, constructed between  and , was once the seat of the
96 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Volkskammer, the East German parliament, but also housed art galleries. Its
architectural style was typical of the DDR, marking a major change from the
building that had stood on the site until the Second World War, the Berlin
Stadtschloss, a baroque palace that had formerly housed the monarchy. The
East German government decided not to rebuild after the war, declaring the
Stadtschloss a remnant of Prussian imperialism and thereby making way for
the construction of a monument to the socialist future. Throughout the Dean’s
film, the sun sets on the Palast, its bronze-mirrored windows emitting a golden
hue. On the soundtrack, cars and pedestrians pass down the nearby Unter den
Linden. The changing states of light emerge as a major concern here – another
reason that the artist insists that her films must be seen on film rather than as
video transfers – but Dean differentiates her work from the formalism of a filmmaker
like Nathaniel Dorsky by insisting on the historical dimension of her
project.
Tacita Dean, Palast ().
The Palast, considered by many to be an eyesore, here attains a fading glory that
surpasses both its contamination by asbestos (coincidentally discovered just
prior to Germany’s  reunification) and the Bundestag’s  decision to rebuild
a replica of the Stadtschloss on the site, thereby overwriting history with a
simulation of it. As Dean puts it, “Berlin needs to keep evidence of that other
place, that country, and its corrupt mismanagement of a utopia that has now
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 97
been crossed out as a mistake in the reckoning of history.”
The failure of utopia:
a familiar theme from the work of Matthew Buckingham, it reemerges here
as an attempt to make sense of Berlin’s recent past. This is not a romantic overvaluation
of a lost epoch, but a call for the necessity of remembering history’s
failures as well as its successes, for it is these catastrophes and defeats that, unacknowledged,
haunt our present. East Germany is one such failed utopia, but
the cinema itself is another. They might be left to oblivion, hit with the passive
violence of forgetting, but in Tacita Dean’s work, both are excavated with care.
Palast is closely linked to a film from several years earlier, Fernsehturm.
This forty-four-minute film shows (once again) the sun setting over a monument
to the DDR often said to be a blemish to the cityscape. As the television
tower slowly revolves, convivial groups eat dinner and look out at the panoramic
view of the city below, with snatches of conversation here and there making
their way onto the soundtrack. Constructed between  and  in Alexanderplatz,
the center of the former East Berlin, the -meter-high tower was a
symbol of a socialist vision of a space-age future that has since turned into a
tourist attraction and a remnant of a fallen regime. It is a s imagination of
the future that was devastatingly never to come true. As Dean writes in a text
entitled “Fernsehturm: Backwards into the Future,” “The revolving sphere in
Space still remains our best image of the future, and yet it is firmly locked in the
past.”
The film’s strange motion, initially appearing to be a slow pan, in fact
results from the revolutions of the tower, inducing a parallax effect. The unusual
movement of the film finds a counterpart in its temporal complexity. The
-degree rotation of the tower and the diurnal cycle suggested by the setting
sun bring forth a notion of eternal recurrence, but the film also stages a collision
between the city’s present, its past, and its unrealized futures that suggests a
much more fragmented and irregular temporality than that of the cyclical return.
East Germany’s nation anthem, Auferstanden aus Ruinen – “resurrected
from ruins” – proclaimed in its opening lines that the country was “faced towards
the future” [der Zukunft zugewandt], but the collapse of the dream of this
other future has now left in its wake phantoms of past trauma and no way of
conceptualizing an alternative to the contemporary status quo. As Nabokov
suggests, it is from the inability to know the future that the past emerges as
such a source of fascination, for otherwise one would have nowhere left to turn
but inwards on the hollow vacancy of the instantaneousness of the present.
Dean describes the tower as a “perfect anachronism,” and yet one must caution
against assertions such as Tamara Trodd’s: “While Dean thus makes films
which engage with the work of remembering the past, her work emerges from
an engagement not so much with obsolescence per se as with the anachronistic
tout court...Ruined and battered as they are, these objects are not so much obsolescent
or simply outdated, as forever moored outside of time.”
It must be
98 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
remembered that anachronism is a concept far from achronism, which would
denote a state of timelessness, a place outside of time. Rather, the Oxford English
Dictionary defines anachronism as, “An error in computing time, or fixing
dates; the erroneous reference of an event, circumstance, or custom to a wrong
date,” and “Anything done or existing out of date; hence, anything which was
proper to a former age, but is, or, if it existed, would be, out of harmony with
the present.”
Anachronism describes the coexistence of multiple temporalities
that are found within the ruin, while obsolescence highlights the inevitability of
entropic dispersion that is the underside of novelty, leading to disappearance.
Obsolescence and anachronism are both at play in Palast, Fernsehturm, and
across Dean’s body of work – but nowhere is there a removal from the vicissitudes
of time.
Trodd is intent to argue that the emphasis on failure found in Dean’s practice
makes her work incompatible with the imagining of utopia, since the only collectivity
that can be imagined is either failed, temporally confused, or fictiona-
lized.
However, in an age that has lost its ability to imagine alternative futures,
opening the possibility of past contingencies still serves to dislodge the
necessity of our present. The utopian hopes that Trodd ascribes to an earlier
generation of filmmakers (s figures such as Michael Snow and Anthony
McCall) were themselves unachieved. And moreover, it is in the nature of utopia
to always lie elsewhere – perhaps in the past, the future, or even in fiction –
for if it were present, it would no longer be utopia. Thus, utopia and failure are
by no means opposed concepts as they are deployed in Dean’s filmmaking, but
must be seen as working together, much as they do in the work of Matthew
Buckingham.
In contemporary German culture, the term Ostalgie (an English rendering of
the term might be Eastalgia) has gained currency to describe a nostalgia for the
former East Germany. Epitomized by films such as Goodbye, Lenin! () and
Sun Alley (Sonnenallee, ), Ostalgie offers up the DDR as so many signifiers
to consume. In the words of Mattias Frey, the films “fetishize and indulge in
blithe pastiche” of that country’s material culture.
In such films, nostalgia
functions much as it has been famously elaborated by Frederic Jameson: as a
predominant symptom of the waning of historicity associated with postmo-
dernism.
However, if one sees nostalgia not merely as an unproblematic
longing for the past satisfied through consumption, but takes up its etymological
origin to see it as an affective tissue that also involves pain, it loses something
of its reactionary value and comes closer to describing what is at play in
Dean’s Palast and Fernsehturm. Instead of engaging in the reenactments of
Ostalgie films, Dean reflects on the DDR through the ruin – that is, through the
present.
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 99
Though Giuliana Bruno asserts that we live in an age “repelled by ruination,”
Andreas Huyssen sees an obsession with ruins as becoming pervasive
over the last fifteen years, a time that – Huyssen does not make this connection,
but it should be noted – witnessed both the flowering of the Internet and wireless
technologies in a burst of technological novelty, as well as increasing desperation
following the collapse of the USSR that there can be no alternative to
global capitalism.
As Huyssen writes,
This contemporary obsession with ruins hides a nostalgia for an earlier age that had
not yet lost its power to imagine other futures. At stake is a nostalgia for modernity
that dare not speak its name after acknowledging the catastrophes of the twentieth
century and the lingering injuries of inner and outer colonization. Yet this nostalgia
persists, straining for something lost with the ending of an earlier form of modernity.
The cipher for this nostalgia is the ruin.
Though Michael Newman’s notion of “rescue” is persuasive in relation to some
of Dean’s work, Fernsehturm and Palast, in their remembrance of the failed
utopia of the DDR, engage in something much closer to Huyssen’s “nostalgia
for ruins” – and more specifically, in a nostalgia for the ruined dreams of twentieth-century
modernity. Like de Rijke and de Rooij’s “halted quest for understanding,”
like Buckingham’s inability to access the moments of inscription or
abandonment, the fantasy of presence and preservation here withers within the
vertigo of time. The aim of these films is not to unproblematically resurrect the
socialist dream advanced by these architectural structures, but to emphasize the
necessity of conceiving of history as a succession of ruins of failure as much as
of monuments to success, to look at the spectral traces of the past. The ruin has
the passage of time engraved on its very surface, thus bearing witness to the
movements of change and stasis with a fragile persistence that is becoming increasingly
rare as digital novelty triumphs.
The “seamlessness” Dean sees as characterizing the digital must be opposed
to the heterogeneous temporality of the ruin and the desires it engenders.
Svetlana Boym asserts that, “The early twenty-first century exhibits a strange
ruinophilia, a fascination with ruins that goes beyond postmodern quotation
marks. In our increasingly digital age, ruins appear as an endangered species,
as physical embodiments of modern paradoxes reminding us of the blunders of
modern technologies and technologies alike...”
Boym makes the link explicit
whereas Huyssen does not: this contemporary “ruinophilia” is linked to anxieties
around digitization and tied inextricably to failures both technological and
social. A sort of reaction formation, it is amidst an overproduction of novelty
that the superannuated fascinates. In examining the contemporary proliferation
of digital devices that function as so many bodily prostheses, one’s gaze drifts
back to the cinema, which suddenly appears different. Artistic practices such as
100 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
de Rijke/de Rooij’s, Buckingham’s, and Dean’s produce a meditation on the
medium’s specificity precisely at such a juncture, emphasizing its relationship
to nonsynchronous temporalities and the ability to produce an affectively
charged experience of the past. Very different than conceptions of film’s specificity
throughout the twentieth century, now cinema lies in ruins and, as such, is
invested with the curiosity and care that the ruin elicits. This can be dismissed
as nothing but nostalgia, or as the product of a dangerous romanticization, but
to do so would be to show disinterest in the attempt to understand precisely
why and how the analogue and the obsolete fascinate in the way that they incontrovertibly
do. In these practices, the cinema is seen as an apparatus that
cannot be absolved of its sins, but that must be dismantled and reassembled,
anatomized and examined for its successes and shortcomings – like all the failed
utopias of the twentieth century. Transfigured by the light of technological
change, it now takes on something it was once said to destroy – aura.
Analogue Aura
Like an angel at apotheosis, the now-seraphic cinema gains an ethereal halo
within the gallery. Salvaged from the ruins of twentieth-century mass culture,
in which it had figured as an agent of image proliferation and circulation, within
the white cube the cinema is aligned with preciousness and rarity. The preceding
sections have grappled with the ways in which the recent employment
of celluloid within the gallery reconfigures medium specificity in the light of
obsolescence to see film as closely linked to disappearance, the historical trace,
and the failed utopia from which hope for the future might be gleaned. This
becoming-precious of the ruined cinema has taken place on the planes of technology,
rhetoric, and artistic practice. However, no inquiry into artists’ uses of
celluloid would be complete without examining how the institutional and economic
determinations of the gallery – foremost among them the prevalence of
the limited-edition model of distribution – intervene in the contemporary conceptualization
of mm film in the gallery. If the cinema is liberated from utility
to enter over into the disinterestedness of aesthetic contemplation, it simultaneously
enters a new circuit of exchange and commodification: the art market.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin
famously states that, “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility
of the work of art is the latter’s aura,” and specified film as the primary
agent in this liquidation.
The decline of aura is described as a “stripping of
the veil” from the object that “extracts sameness even from what is unique.”
Linked to cult value and the artwork’s former emplacement in ritual, in the
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 101
“Work of Art” essay, the aura is defined in an antithetical relationship to film,
which replaces a unique location in space and time, a “unique apparition of
distance, however near it may be,” with a proliferation of copies that allows the
masses to bring things closer by way of their reproduction.
Cult value is replaced
by exhibition value. When the aura is discussed in relationship to film, it
is in the context of the “false aura” of the commodity, epitomized for Benjamin
in the close-up of the movie star. What was once the preternatural halo of genuine
aura has now been replaced by the “putrid magic of its own commodity
character,” the very same transcendence of sensuousness that Marx attributed
to commodity fetishism.
Nonetheless, even in the final,  version of the “Work of Art” essay, a time
by which so much of Benjamin’s writing had been infiltrated by a profound
pessimism stemming from totalitarianism’s sweep across Europe and by which
so many of the utopian hopes for film had already been dashed, Benjamin retains
an investment in the revolutionary potential of the medium of film. This
investment must be understood as twofold: first, film’s destruction of aura has a
positive valence, for it liquidates the categories of bourgeois aesthetics, a notion
encapsulated in Benjamin’s discussion of Dada; and second, the shock effects of
film might help negotiate the traumatic effects of modernity, since its tactile visuality
allows access to another nature than accessible to the naked eye, the
“optical unconscious.”
The task at hand is to evaluate how these two investments
in the medium appear today.
To take up the first postulate, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it
must be said that film has not so much aided in the destruction of traditional
aesthetic values as it has been recuperated into them, thus neutralizing Benjamin’s
first hope for the medium. When the historical avant-garde made films
such as Entr’acte () and Un Chien andalou (), the aim was, among
other things, to utilize technological media to critique the increasing autonomy
of the work of art. By drawing attention to art’s institutional framing, the historical
avant-garde thereby aimed to reintegrate art into the praxis of everyday
life.
In the s, when the Fluxus group included films in their Fluxboxes,
once again the goal was to intervene in the ideological status of the work of art
by insisting on the multiple as a form of artistic production.
The contemporary situation sees an inversion of Fluxus’ use of the film print.
For Fluxus, film was a way to bring art to the level of the quotidian and the
reproducible, to defeat its autonomy and uniqueness. Now, however, the limited
edition is used to elevate the film to the status of an art object, recuperating
it into the economy that it once compromised. This becomes possible at this
historical juncture in large part due to the increasing obsolescence of the medium.
As Whitney Museum curators Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldisch put
it, while the use of the film limited edition is not new, “...it is significant that
102 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
many younger artists choose to work in a mode that treats film as object. This
trend has everything to do with the ready availability on the consumer market
of digital recording and editing devices that assert the medium of film as a precious,
non-commercial material.”
In a similar vein, differentiating between experimental film and artists’ cinema
as modes of production, Jonathan Walley writes that, “Simply put, artists’
film regards the film print as an art object in a way that avant-garde cinema
does not.”
Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat () is a -minute mm film
heavily indebted to James Benning (and indeed lists him as a creative consultant
on the film). It features portraits of children amongst the landscape of the foothills
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in a succession of twelve static long takes.
In its quietude, long duration, attention to the registration of contingent details,
and the care taken in examining the fleeting moments of childhood in a small
town, Lockhart’s film resolutely fits the strain of gallery-based mm production
that has been examined throughout this chapter. Exhibited both as a looped
installation on multiple mm projectors and in a traditional theatrical setting,
for distribution the work was issued by Lockhart’s Los Angeles-based gallery
Blum and Poe in a boxed edition of six, comprised of nineteen photographic
prints and each of the twelve shots on a different reel of film. The object was
priced in the six figures.
Issuing editions of this kind either including supplementary
materials such as still photographs or offering them for sale separately
has become standard practice within the art world.
Scott MacDonald, who reports that an edition of Lockhart’s thirty-two-minute
film, No (), was available from the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York
for $,, is hopeful about the possibility that the popularity of the limitededition
artist’s film will lead to an increased interest in collecting mm prints of
experimental films: “...No, and Lockhart’s films in general, are often evocative of
the films of James Benning, Morgan Fisher, and other filmmakers whom Lockhart
herself considers her mentors. It is only a matter of time before the work of
these mentors is accorded a similar level of financial respect that Lockhart’s
films receive.”
Perhaps; and it would be well deserved, indeed. But MacDonald’s
reasoning here is faulty, for he proposes that work of aesthetic similarity
(here, the relationship between Lockhart and her mentors) should logically
command a financial similarity. Rather, what is at stake is not an aesthetic criterion
of value, but rather the vast difference in the distribution models espoused
by these two sectors of film production. Experimental cinema has historically
depended on a licensing model based on depositing prints with a distributor
such as Canyon Cinema or Film-maker’s Cooperative that then rents the prints
according to a per-screening fee. These fees can vary greatly, but often come in
at between three to five dollars per minute of projected mm film. By contrast,
the economy of artists’ cinema makes use of a purposeful scarcity, most often
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins 103
striking an edition of three to five copies of a given work (plus artist’s proofs) so
as to imbue the physical object of the film print with the pull of rarity. This
allows for an entirely different price bracket, leading to Tacita Dean’s Michael
Hamburger () and Darmstädter Werkblock () to be offered for
, and , euros, respectively, at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New
York, in Spring . Going against the capacity for reproducibility inherent in
the medium, the willful restriction of the number of prints available according
to the limited-edition model prohibits excessive circulation of these works, artificially
rendering back to film a quality of auratic distance. It becomes a privileged
experience to be present before a de Rijke and de Rooij film, to share a
room with it for a particular duration of time. In this respect, the becomingauratic
of film is of the same variety as the false aura of the movie star – a perfidious
halo that smacks of the “putrid magic” of the commodity. One must
sound a cautionary note against the manner in which the enforced scarcity of
the limited-edition model of distribution contributes to the values of preciousness
and antiquation one sees attached to celluloid film within the gallery.
However, it remains to account of what happened to Benjamin’s second investment
in the medium of film, specified above as linked to the possibilities of
the optical unconscious and the creation of alternative temporalities. Though
film has been thoroughly recuperated into the ever-redoubtable categories of
bourgeois aesthetics, this second wager of film’s potential might find itself ratified,
rather than compromised, by the contemporary situation of film in the gallery.
As Miriam Hansen has noted, understanding aura merely as a category of
traditional aesthetics that might be falsely resurrected through technology rests
on a reductive reading of Benjamin. Instead, Hansen excavates Benjamin’s use
of the concept to recover its multivalent meanings, emphasizing that in fact,
aura – of a related but different variety – is equally at play in the optical unconscious,
particularly in the Dauthendey portrait discussed in the “Little His-
tory.”
This conception of aura is intimately linked to the indexical trace, the
disjunctive temporalities that reside therein, and the relationship these qualities
set up to the viewing subject – all of which are exploited in the variety of gallery-based
mm practices discussed here. Hansen explores connections between
auratic distance and the sorrow of lost time, seeing the defining elements
of the aura as “its sudden and fleeting disruption of linear time, its uncanny
linkage of past and future – and the concomitant dislocation of the subject.”
In short, in this conception the aura is no longer defined in an antithetical relation
to technological media, but takes on a much more complex relationship to
it. The affective complex that has been discussed throughout this chapter as
central to the idea of the medium put forth in contemporary gallery film is here
named aura.
104 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Thus, if, through its emphasis on the film print as rare object, gallery-based
mm practice partakes of the false aura of the commodity, in its meditations of
history, time, and desire, it nonetheless partakes of this other aura – an aura that
is historically specific and linked to an investigation of nonsynchronous temporalities
and the contingent. Retrieved from the teleological narrative of history,
the cinema emerges as a superannuated technology, a ruin to be explored so as
to perhaps release, as Benjamin saw the Surrealists as having discovered, “the
revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’” As he wrote, the Surrealists
“bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the
point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined
at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s
lips?”
Such a life would be impoverished, indeed, for it would reside solely
within the perpetual novelty that is endemic to the motor of capitalism’s market.
It would see the past products of this system, no longer tinged with the
gleam that coats the ever-same presented as ever-new, fall into total oblivion.
Instead, Benjamin advocates for an artistic practice, a life, informed by the complex
affects that reside within the discarded objects of mass culture, for it is in
them that history resides.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one witnesses the dissolution of
a certain phase of image production and apprehension that had dominated for a
century – the traditional cinematic dispositif. While Hollywood’s products maintain
a worldwide visibility, available in more formats and locations that ever
before, in the theories and practices discussed throughout this chapter, one
glimpses a palpable act of mourning for a lost image-regime and a lost relationship
to time that it made possible. As such, the notions of deathliness found
within the concept of indexicality reference not merely a haunting of the Real,
but are also symptomatic of the presence of another specter, that of analogue
film. The concept of indexicality thus indicates both death in the image and a
death of the image. The prominence the concept has attained in recent film theory
is a kind of love at last sight, whereby the desire of the critic to resurrect this
lost object parallels the pathos of the index’s ability to point to a lost past. In The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Christian Metz begins by outlining
the changed relation between theorist and film that would be spurred by
the use of psychoanalytic semiotics as a critical methodology. Previous criticism,
based on notions of aesthetic taste, constituted cinema as a love object and are
described as beset by a sort of “siege psychosis”: the task was to “to surround
and protect [the film], according to the cocoon principle.”
In such a scenario,
cinema and its theoretical discourse remain firmly on the side of the imaginary,
caught in the thrall of cinephilia. Metz figures the advent of psychoanalytic
semiotics as the intrusion of the symbolic that breaks the mother-child dyad of
critic and film, after which the critic should “not have forgotten what the cineChapter
2 – Filmic Ruins 105
phile he once used to be was like, in all the details of his affective inflections, in
the three dimensions of his living being, and yet to no longer be invaded by
him.”
While certainly, discussions of indexicality have not forgotten the lessons
of s film, there is a clear desire to protect the cinema once again, a
renewal of this “siege psychosis.” This is a kind of cinephilia that is far from
that of the Tarantino-esque video store clerk, but rather one that invests in the
material of celluloid as evincing a privileged link to time, history, and finitude.
In the films of Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, and Jeroen de Rijke/Willem
de Rooij, one finds these same preoccupations at work. The return to medium
specificity here must be understood as a reaction formation to the forces
of dissolution and fragmentation that pervade today’s climate of convergence.
Unlike artists such as Matthew Barney or Doug Aitken, who turn towards the
language of blockbuster cinema, these artists take up what is at stake in the
passage of cinema into the gallery as a marginal form, a cast-off of mass culture,
an old medium. The interrogation they stage into the medium-specific qualities
of film does not seal off the work into a modernist spiral of recursivity, but
rather fastens onto the radical lack of autonomy found in the film image, its
inextricable link to a trace of pastness and the haunted quality that results. The
dialectical movement visible here is not merely between specificity and convergence,
but also between the material limits of the medium and its placement
within the institutional and discursive determinations of a larger dispositif. For
the material base of the image certainly matters to these artists, but not for its
own sake; rather, what is interrogated here is the way in which the constraints
of materiality interact with the medium’s ability to engage with the social and
the historical. Central to this tension is the important role fears of obsolescence
play in the current conceptualization of the medium of film. For when Tacita
Dean obsessively attempts to grab hold of the green ray as it flashes up on the
horizon, she is equally attempting to grab hold of film itself, to register its contingencies
as it slips away.
106 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New
Narratives
I suppose that if a work of art is by definition that which conserves, a mythology
never ceases, on the contrary, to manage itself and to recycle itself according to the
taste of the age and the state of technology... Nothing will be kept of cinema except
that which can be remade.
– Serge Daney

In the spring of , Chris Moukarbel, an MFA student in the Yale University
School of Art’s sculpture department, was sued by Paramount Pictures. Why?
The “nature of the case,” according to the affidavit issued to the United States
District Court, was as follows:
This is an action for copyright infringement pursuant to the Copyright Law of the
United States,  U.S.C. §  et seq. (the “Copyright Act”). This infringement claim
arises from defendant Chris Moukarbel’s (the “Defendant”) unauthorized creation
and distribution of a twelve-minute motion picture which is a virtually identical
copy of a substantial portion of the Plaintiff’s copyrighted screenplay for its upcoming
motion picture World Trade Center.
With a budget of one thousand dollars, a screenplay bought from a bootlegger,
and actors from the Yale School of Drama, Moukarbel remade – or rather premade,
as the feature had not yet been released to the public – sections of Oliver
Stone’s film, World Trade Center (), as his MFA thesis project. Stone’s
$ million film set out to tell the “true story” of John McLoughlin and Will
Jimeno, two of the last survivors to be pulled from underneath the rubble on 
September .
Whereas Stone’s version crosscuts between scenes of the men
trapped underneath the collapsed Twin Towers and diegetically antecedent footage
leading up to the event, Moukarbel stays underneath the debris, stringing
together several disparate snippets of Andrea Berloff’s cliché-ridden screenplay.
Where Stone seeks to inject narrative interest through flashback, Moukarbel
questions the very possibility of responsibly producing such a story. Stone’s
World Trade Center was marketed with the tagline “The World Saw Evil
That Day. Two Men Saw Something Else.” What is this “something else” that
the men-turned-characters of Stone’s movie supposedly saw? True to the conventions
of the genre, perhaps it was the greatness of the human spirit. Moukar-
bel, by contrast, drains the screenplay of its promises of visibility, knowledge,
and redemption. Throughout the video, it is very dark under the collapsed
buildings and there is nothing to be seen; there is no exit from the claustrophobic
enclosure, just a few lines of dialogue torn from context and unsentimentally
delivered to the utter vacuity that Hollywood would bestow upon them. The
radical insufficiency of the representation becomes clear and the distance that
separates it from the event it purports to depict becomes impossible to ignore.
When the work was shown at the sculpture department’s thesis exhibition,
Moukarbel installed a single upward-cast blue-tinted spotlight outside the gallery,
recalling both a film premiere and the Tribute in Light ceremonies that
have been held in lower Manhattan to commemorate the events of /. By condensing
the glitz of Hollywood and a monument in remembrance of national
trauma in a single gesture, the spotlight speaks directly to what is at stake in
the project that Moukarbel named World Trade Center  (): it questions
the cinema’s role as repository of public memory, who has the right to tell
a particular story, and why and how they will tell it. Five years after the event
(too late) and four months before the Hollywood debut (too early), Moukarbel’s
(p)remake deftly utilized its purposeful untimeliness to perform the becomingformulaic
of an exceptional event with a difficult relationship to narration.
Chris Moukarbel, World Trade Center  ().
Hollywood, with its astounding global reach, has emerged as perhaps the primary
way the historical narratives of the twentieth century have been delivered
to us. Trauma is repackaged as spectacle, given an uplifting human-interest angle,
and fed to the public for consumption, eliding the socio-political vicissitudes
that reside therein in favor of individual-driven narratives with universal
humanist themes. The artist told the New York Times, “I’m interested in memor-
108 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
ial and the way Hollywood represents public events... Through their access and
budget they’re able to affect a lot of people’s ideas about an event and also affect
policy. I was deliberately using their script and preempting their release to make
a statement about power.”
By suing Moukarbel, Paramount compounded
what his project had always been about: the lawsuit pushed questions of ownership
to center stage, prompting an inquiry into the relationship between narrative
as private property and as public memory.
The word trauma comes from the Greek for “wound,” an etymology that
evokes the manner in which the traumatic event punctures the fabric of signification.
It is only through repetition that this asignifying blot can be recuperated
into knowledge. The events of  September  functioned as a national trauma
that served to disrupt established frameworks of understanding, and yet in
the months and years that followed, real dialogue in mainstream media outlets
was quashed by the Bushism of “Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.”
As Judith Butler has written, “The articulation of this hegemony takes
place in part through producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean,
how they can be used, and what lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn through
this use.”
Stone’s World Trade Center was central to the continuing production
of this consensus, as it worked to suture over the wound of trauma with a
representation that would deny ambiguity and contradiction in an embrace of
American unilateralism that told the “true” story of innocent citizens menaced
by an unseen and unknowable enemy. Moukarbel’s World Trade Center 
starts from this problematic to ask: what transformations take place across these
proprietary retellings of an instance of national trauma? How does a fleeting
event – one that troubles our comprehension and quickly recedes into the past
– become digested, monumentalized, and standardized through the production
of Hollywood’s “official” version of it? And what might result from moving
beyond this practice into the domain of unsanctioned remakes that function as
hostile takeovers of an industry obsessive about holding tight rein on its intellectual
property?
Moukarbel distributed the video for free on his website, which eventually
drew enough attention that the project became known to Paramount, resulting
in legal action.
Interestingly, the lawsuit names Moukarbel’s place of residence
as Washington, D.C., even though the Whois record for the artist’s website included
in Paramount’s dossier of supporting evidence lists his address as New
Haven, Connecticut.
By locating the artist in the nation’s capital (where he had
resided some years prior), the lawsuit mobilizes a rhetoric of the enemy within
the heart of America, thus setting up the production of World Trade Center
 as an exemplary unpatriotic act. To rephrase one of George W. Bush’s favorite
sayings, “Either you are with Hollywood or with the terrorists.” While
this might seem like a stretch, it rhymes with a statement made by the late Jack
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 109
Valenti, copyright extremist and long-time president of the Motion Picture Association
of America; regarding unauthorized online distribution of Hollywood
products, Valenti asserted, “We’re fighting our own terrorist war.”
The lawsuit
against Moukarbel also claimed that the “issuance of an injunction would not
substantially harm the other party” since he did not seek commercial gain from
the enterprise, putting forth a notably circumscribed understanding of “harm”
as well as making clear that the lawsuit was not at its core a financial matter.
The lawsuit claimed that, “The preemptive release of the Moukarbel Film on
the Internet before Paramount's WTC Film means that unquantifiable but, most
likely, large numbers of people will see the Mourkarbel Film first for free and
determine, based on this poor-quality copy, that they do not want to pay to see
the remainder of the WTC Film.”
An unnamed Paramount spokeswoman told
the Yale Daily News that, “He stole our material, and he shot a script that we
owned...People were confused, and that's not something we want to happen.”
Obviously, the rhetoric of “confusion” is laughable, despite the fairly high production
quality (given the available resources) of Moukarbel’s video. Though a
case for fair use clearly presented itself, as Lawrence Lessig has written, “...fair
use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to
create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as
fair use is astonishingly bad... It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what
it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The
legal system may be tolerable for the very rich.”
For a graduate student, the
cost of contesting the lawsuit made a claim of fair use unfeasible. The lawsuit
was settled out of court on the condition that Moukarbel destroy all existing
copies of the work.
Rather than any real fear that an unsuspecting Internet user might be dissuaded
from a trip to the multiplex by coming across Moukarbel’s MFA thesis
project, Paramount’s lawsuit speaks to the current climate of copyright paranoia
brought about by the fact that, as Moukarbel himself has put it, “We're at a
place now where technology allows the democratization of storytelling.”
Recent
developments in hardware, software, and bandwidth have spurred practices
of remaking, recycling, and retelling in a way that has disrupted Hollywood’s
near-sovereign majesty over the right to fictionalize history, to say
nothing of its ability to regulate derivative uses of its products.
The Internet is
awash with amateur “mash-ups” and reenactments, the cultural significance of
which has not been lost on contemporary art. While such non-professional online
activities have become the object of litigation, Moukarbel’s World Trade
Center  is something of an exception in the art world, a space in which
practices of basing works on preexisting films have proliferated without major
interference from those who hold copyright on the source texts in question.
Since , there has been an explosion of new narratives created out of old
110 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
movies, often with something to say about “the way Hollywood tells it,” to
borrow from the title of David Bordwell’s study of the narrative conventions of
dominant cinema.
This chapter will examine exemplary works of this tendency to remake commercial
cinema, embracing the notion of the “remake” broadly to designate any
artwork produced by reworking elements of an existing film. This might involve
recycling existing footage, reenacting a scenario from a film, interviewing
an individual whose life has been involved with film production, or producing
non-filmic objects by using an existing film as a source. Such practices appear as
the progeny of appropriation art born in the Internet age, making use of commercially
available software such as Final Cut Pro and manipulable digital
video files to take up the products of Hollywood as raw material for an investigation
into the ways in which popular media shape subjectivity and experience.
Claude Lévi-Strauss defined mythic narrative as an imaginary solution of a real
contradiction, ascribing to it a fundamentally synthetic function, while Frederic
Jameson has built upon this premise to demonstrate that this synthesis never
takes place without a residue that may be read so as to reveal the “political
unconscious” that lies latent.
The counter-narratives produced by artists remaking
old movies often take this residue as a starting point and use it to produce
narratives of analysis rather than synthesis. Instead of an imaginary resolution
of contradiction, the very terms of conflict that had formerly been
sublated now reemerge in tension with one another. In order to evade the traps
of a discursive position falsely external to the spectacle it seeks to criticize, these
artists bring together spectators through their common recognition of mass cultural
icons and stories. This at once forces them to take account of how thoroughly
such icons and stories have shaped the ways in which they understand
their lives and their history. It also, however, allows for the formation of a community
around such collective recognition, repurposing the shared memory towards
knowledge-producing ends.
Though the remake as a strategy in art since  emerges as a privileged
iteration of a more widespread rejection of the unique and the original at this
time, it is in fact as old as cinema itself, with the Lumière brothers often making
multiple versions of their short actualités, which were then copied by others the
world over. It has a long history in Hollywood in particular, from repeated literary
adaptations such as Imitation of Life (by John Stahl in  and Douglas
Sirk in ), to Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Haneke’s self-remakes (the former
with The Man Who Knew Too Much in  and , the latter with
Funny Games in  and ) to the contemporary trend of the transnational
remake embodied most forcefully in J-Horror crossovers such as Ringu/The
Ring (/) and Ju-on/The Grudge (/) and seemingly undying
action franchises such as Rambo and Terminator. The very action of remaking
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 111
is central to the Hollywood system, which ceaselessly produces updates of the
same themes and retells the same stories, feeding off of the corpses of national
cinemas and cult genres when necessary. As Lessig notes, Hollywood is no bastion
of originality, but was built by “fleeing pirates” – people who left New
York for California in an effort to get away from the monopoly Edison had secured
through his patent holdings.
Peter Decherney, meanwhile, has suggested
that, “The Hollywood studio system was built on plagiarism just as the
early film industry had been built on piracy.”
Though the action is the same, the forms of remaking that have emerged in
contemporary art often have very little in common with their Hollywood counterparts,
working to question mainstream cinema rather than to ensure profit
margins. When the tables are turned and Hollywood winds up as the host of
the derivative work rather than the parasite that creates one, the character of
the remake shifts from a hope for guaranteed revenue to a site of unsanctioned
use.
Such works serve to call into question Hollywood’s univocity, interjecting
another perspective into a discourse that presents itself as seamless. Daniel Birnbaum
questions, “...[W]hy steal from cinema? Perhaps the answer is that video
can pose questions to film that film is incapable of putting to itself.”
Birnbaum’s
use of language risks suggesting that the matter is a question of the
medium, that video might provide the remove necessary to ask questions that
would be impossible to confront through the medium of film. Rather than a
case of video versus film, however, what is truly at stake is a relationship between
art and cinema: through appropriations of Hollywood films, artists address
questions of ideology, subjectivity, history, and collectivity that are at once
crucial to contemporary art practice and that reveal something about the past
and present of cinema. These works attempt to tell the other side of the story of
Hollywood’s official discourse: they actualize a possibility that had rested dormant
in the host text, sometimes in fierce opposition to it, sometimes in adulation,
but most often with a marked ambivalence that embraces certain aspects of
the text while challenging others. A remake might investigate the representational
codes of an existing work, it might reflect on its relationship to history, it
might focus on the labor of spectatorship, it might fetishize a loved film, it
might question what new possibilities for freedom and control are made possible
by the digitization of cinema, or it might do something else entirely. It is
impossible to generalize a single relation between a remake and its host text,
but what unites all the remakes that will be discussed in this chapter is that
they all exhibit cinema: that is, they hold it up for examination and investigate its
contemporary state by using its past products as raw material.
This chapter will bracket a consideration of cross-medium remakes that serve
to illuminate medium-specific characteristics through hybrid formations of cinema/new
media (such as Cory Arcangel’s Colors []) and cinema/painting
112 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
(such as Sam Taylor-Wood’s Still Life [] and A Little Death []).
Instead, it will examine how strategies of remaking serve to set up a relation to
cinema as a social institution that functions as a cultural vernacular and a reservoir
of shared experience. Through a discussion of work by Candice Breitz,
Douglas Gordon, Chris Moukarbel, and others, it will situate the popularity of
the remake as an aesthetic strategy within the histories of art and cinema and
provide an account of exactly what kinds of relationships to cinema – and to
Hollywood cinema in particular – are imagined by these artists. For Moukabel,
the concern is questioning how the cinematic institution digests and monumentalizes
historical events. Breitz interrogates the status of fandom in a digital age,
while Gordon makes visible the contours of a post-VHS cinephilia. All of these
artists, then, turn to Hollywood cinema for different reasons, but all of them
find within it an ambivalent site of collectivity and make use of the shared cultural
memory of cinema to tackle spectacular culture from within.
Ambivalent Appropriations
While the remake may be used as a strategy of media critique, it must be emphasized
that activities of remaking are by no means inherently critical; rather, a
diversity of positions vis-à-vis the host text is possible, ranging from outright
condemnation to lionizing homage. Chrissie Iles has remarked that “the relationship
between art and film is a one-way love affair,” but if it is so, it is most
undoubtedly a love/hate affair.
References to film history proliferate, making
it possible to speak of a palpable cinephilia within contemporary art, but simultaneously,
a large number of these references hold up dominant cinema as a
great exemplar of the machinations of culture industries. One thus confronts a
marked ambivalence towards the cinematic institution. On one end of the spectrum,
Moukarbel’s World Trade Center  manifests nothing but contempt
for Stone’s original. Similarly, RSG-BLACK- (), Radical Software Group’s
algorithmic reediting of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (), reverse engineers
the racial segregationism of what group member Alex Galloway called a
“Jim Crow film” by algorithmically editing out all white characters.
This reduces
the running time of the film – which is “based on a true story” of the U.S.
Army mission to Mogadishu, Somalia, on  October  – from  minutes to
only :.
Works such as these engage the legacy of appropriation art as a
mode of critique, invoking the Situationist International’s technique of détournement
as an important precedent.
This outright condemnation of the appropriated film is, however, by no
means generalizable as a characteristic of contemporary art remakes of old
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 113
movies. In some cases, a distinct cinephilia emerges. Take, for example, Kota
Ezawa’s LYAM -D (), a three-dimensional animated remake of Alain Resnais’
Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, ) or
Stan Douglas’ Inconsolable Memories (), a loose remake of Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo,
) transposed to the Mariel boatlift of : here, beloved art cinema
classics are appropriated as a way to investigate temporality and historical
memory, respectively. There is no move to dismantle the host films, but on the
contrary a desire to mobilize the discourses they explore and bring them into
confrontation with present concerns. Meanwhile, Christoph Draeger’s Schizo
(Redux) () stages a cinephilic comparison between Psycho () and Gus
Van Sant’s  remake of that film by laying one on top of the other in a
ghostly doubling that highlights the many differences between Hitchcock’s film
and its supposed shot-by-shot copy. In Feel Lucky, Punk??! (-), Draeger
moves into the fantasies of cinematic identification by engaging friends to
recreate hold up scenes from Magnum Force (), Natural Born Killers
(), Pulp Fiction (), Taxi Driver (), and Thelma and Louise
(). In describing the production of the work, Draeger invoked a gathering
of friends happy to return to the playacting of childhood and the joy of pretending
to be robbers.
Most often, the polarities of love and hate are both present in a decidedly
ambivalent relationship to cinema that sees them intermingle within a single
work. If, as chapter one demonstrated, the moving image in contemporary art
must be seen as a major component of the spectacularization of that domain,
practices of remaking deploy the ambivalent pleasures of cinema and its status
as a cultural vernacular to problematize spectacular culture from within. Rather
than unqualified aggression or unqualified affection, one finds a conflicted relationship
to cinema that sees it as occupying a double position: its mass appeal is
valorized for its ability to forge an imagined collectivity, but this mass character
is simultaneously acknowledged as a site of ideological interpellation and possible
exploitation. In terms of the formal operations of remaking, one might say
that film history is submitted to a kind of murder by scissors, but this recontextualization
can also be a form of homage or tribute.
Douglas Gordon, perhaps the best known of the artists working with found
footage, has proclaimed that, “for us” – presumably his generation of artists –
the cinema “is already dead.”
Pierre Bismuth, meanwhile, easily shrugs off
any apparent relation to cinephilia: “Anyways, I am not really that interested in
the cinema. I used it as a tool for capturing the viewer’s attention.”
In a similar
vein, Pierre Huyghe has stated that,
The label of being nostalgic for cinema has been glued to me in an easy way. As if one
was to say of Cézanne that he liked apples or that Picasso liked bulls! I have no fasci-
114 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
nation for the cinema. I’m interested in it because it is the vehicle of our collective
unconscious, of our relationship to the scenario.
But only as much as the supermodel
Kate Moss, an advertisement, or a music video!
Statements such as these seem to support Raymond Bellour’s assertion that
Douglas Gordon is “without nostalgia” and suggest that it might be extended
to other artists working with the remake.
And yet, the often deadpan work of
Bismuth, Gordon, and Huyghe witnesses the continuation of cinema by other
means, a cinema that is perhaps uncannily “undead” rather than already buried
and gone. The disavowal of cinephilia in these artists’ statements does not neutralize
the ways in which their work makes use of a love for cinema; it does not
do away with the fact that their work manifests cinephilia even if the artists
themselves do not profess to be cinephiles. Significantly, Huyghe never does
investigate Kate Moss or a music video, but instead returns to the cinema again
and again as a repository of material to be replayed and remade.
Gordon may personally lack nostalgia; he may be blissfully unaware of the
experimental film traditions his work sometimes engages. He may see the historical
products of cinema as nothing but a moribund set of images ripe for
recontextualization, but his work nonetheless depends on a cultural climate
characterized by a widespread nostalgia for classical cinema. This nostalgia is
not that of the postmodern historicism described by Jameson, marked by an
eclectic mixing of signifiers at odds with genuine historicism and exemplified
by films such as American Graffiti () and Body Heat ().
Rather,
though these works share “‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of
the aesthetic effect”, they in no way function as quotations that seek to displace
history with surface effects.
On the contrary, many of these works use strategies
of remaking precisely to agitate against the ways in which cinema has functioned
to spectacularize the past and reduce it to nothing more than a space to
be colonized by glossy surface styles. They serve to assert cinema as a site of
collectivity and shared cultural memory, very different from the amnesiac pastiche
of Jamesonian postmodernism.
To assert that there is a cinephilic tendency in contemporary art is not to suggest
that the artists involved profess a personal love for cinema or have any
extensive knowledge of film history. Rather, it is to discern, on a cultural plane
that extends far beyond the individual subjectivity of a given artist, the emergence
of narrative cinema as a highly cathected object within the artistic production
of the last two decades. This is, of course, not the case without exception,
as World Trade Center  suggests. But the impact of a work such as
 Hour Psycho () cannot be considered outside of its relation to a public
intimately familiar with Hitchcock’s films, a public that finds in these films
something to trigger a memory that returns with all the bittersweetness of time
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 115
lost and regained. Through this employment of the resurrected familiar made
strange, these works stage a relation between the private and public dimensions
of contemporary cinema. They are made possible by the private cinema of VHS
and DVD and yet, through their location within the museum and their resurrection
of a past image regime, they offer a possibility of recovering a relation to
collectivity crucial to the specificity of theatrical exhibition. The production of
art derived from old movies provides a way of taking the private cinephilia of
watching films on television and video back into the public sphere and subjecting
it to scrutiny.
The Four Operations
Contemporary practices of remaking may be grouped into four primary operations
that describe the technique used to repurpose an appropriated film: reenacting,
interviewing, recycling, and translating.
Before delving into works
that represent this tendency, it will be helpful to outline a schematic typology of
these operations so as to provide a broad overview of the techniques employed
in the practices that have come to prominence since .
Reenactment has become a widespread practice in contemporary art, extending
beyond references to film history to also include the reenactment of events
both historical (Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave []) and art historical
(Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces [], for which the artist reenacted
seven canonical performance art pieces in one week at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York).
Contrary to these examples, which reenact singular
events, the reenactments under discussion in this chapter repeat something that
already existed as a repetition, as a representation already mobile within culture.
Brice Dellsperger’s body double series (-ongoing), for example, consists
of over twenty reenactments of segments of popular films that serve to
investigate the performativity of gender and the problem of authenticity. Often
Dellsperger will play all parts within an excerpt, as in body double  (),
which remakes the elevator murder scene from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to
Kill (). A male artist playing both the female victim and the transvestite
male murderer remakes a movie that is itself in large part a very loose remake
of Hitchcock, thereby throwing into crisis any stable sense of copy and original.
Later in the series, Dellsperger explores having multiple non-professionals reenact
the same role and exhibits all performances simultaneously as a multiscreen
installation; body double  () uses nine screens for nine reenactments
of the scene from the conclusion of Blow Out (), in which Jack (John
Travolta) finds Sally (Nancy Allen) dead on the roof during the fireworks.
116 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Brice Dellsperger, body double  ().
Stan Douglas’ Subject to a Film: Marnie () is a six-minute black-andwhite
mm remake of the robbery sequence from Marnie () that loops
back to the beginning when the title character’s hands are on the safe. Instead
of continuing the narrative to depict the discovery of Marnie’s crime, Douglas
imprisons her in a nightmarish eternal return of never-ending theft but gives
her salvation from another kind of imprisonment: marrying Mark Rutland.
Through this tension between the loop (common in gallery exhibition) and the
teleology of start-to-finish viewing (proper to the cinema), Douglas highlights
the important question of how experiences of narrativity are impacted by cinema’s
integration into the gallery space. Reenactment emerges as a way of producing
difference from repetition, of producing the new from the old at a time
when notions of novelty and originality are held under suspicion. Maeve Connolly
has suggested that, “The rise of reenactment may also signal a crisis of
belief in the future, in line with the economic and social developments of the
post- era.”
It introduces a complex and fractured temporality, as it summons
an earlier event while remaining distinctly anchored in the present. It acknowledges
that the only access to the past is through a representation of it, but
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 117
by remaking this representation, it can point to its failures, omissions, and
biases.
The interview provides artists with a way of engaging with individuals whose
lives have become intertwined with the production of feature films in one way
or another. The reified images of the culture industry occlude the labor that goes
into their production, seemingly materializing out of nowhere as glossy ciphers.
Countering this prevailing regime, the action of interviewing individuals involved
with the making of feature films reintroduces a social relation into the
circulation of images and prompts a consideration of the affective labor that
goes into their production. For Blanche Neige Lucie (), Pierre Huyghe
interviewed Lucie Dolène, the woman who dubbed the voice of Snow White in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves () into French in . In the mids
after receiving no royalties from the film’s  VHS release, Dolène successfully
sued Disney and regained the legal rights to her voice. When Jane and
Louise Wilson were commissioned to make a work in response to the holdings
of the Stanley Kubrick Archives, they delivered Unfolding the Aryan Papers
(). For this work, the artists interviewed Dutch actress Johanna Ter Steege,
who was set to play the lead role in the Aryan Papers project, a film about the
Holocaust that Kubrick researched for many years but never made. The work
functions as a portrait of the actress and of a failed project, but also mobilizes
discourses of the Holocaust as an unrepresentable event, as Ter Steege recounts
that the film remained unfinished because Kubrick couldn’t bear the responsibility;
she says, “No one can represent this.”
Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List () responds to a similar question from another
angle. In this double-channel installation, Fast interviews Polish extras
who participated in the production of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust blockbuster
Schindler’s List (), a film that received both glowing praise and virulent
criticism. Fast makes use of three kinds of footage, each performing its own
negotiation between the Hollywoodization of the Shoah and the historical Real:
there are talking head interviews with these extras, footage of the replica of the
Plaszow camp built as a film set and never fully dismantled, and segments of
the “Schindler’s List Tour” that caters to the many (mostly American) tourists
that have visited Poland since the film’s release. Often, a tour operator tells us,
these visitors make little distinction between remnants of the Second World
War and their film-set replicas. Throughout the interviews, the distinction between
personal experience and acted role blurs, as one respondent abruptly
shifts from a discussion of her own life in wartime Poland to some fifty years
later when she acted in Spielberg’s film.
Recycled works make use of footage from existing films, evincing a certain
kinship with the subgenre of experimental cinema known as the found-footage
film but often rejecting the model of start-to-finish viewing proper to it. The
118 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
digitization and networking of cinema that took place in the s allowed
what was once a technique requiring access to stock footage and equipment
such as an optical printer to become something able to be accomplished with
minimal skill, resulting in an explosion of recycled works on the Internet and in
galleries. Many of these works make use of kinds of recycling that would have
been difficult or impossible before the advent of DVDs, high-bandwidth Internet,
and easy-to-use editing software, such as an increased emphasis on remaking
popular films. The found-footage genre has a rich history within experimental
film, but before the s, such films often made use of repurposed footage
with no intent that the spectator would or should identify the original source.
In the years since, the recognizability of the source footage has become an integral
part of much found-footage practice. The present viewing is always redoubled
by a memory of seeing the source film in the past, introducing a different
relation to the host footage than the ur-text of the found-footage film, Joseph
Cornell’s Rose Hobart (). It is widely known that the footage of Cornell’s
homage stems from East of Borneo (), in which Hobart starred. And yet,
Cornell’s reediting of Hobart’s appearances in that film by no means necessitates
a familiarity with it in order to achieve its full impact.
Quite differently, since , many recycled works depend on their host films’
popularity and recognizability across a wide demographic. Christian Marclay’s
The Clock () is a supercut of twenty-four hours’ worth of narrative cinema’s
engagements with temporality that encourages spectators to remain
aware of time while at the movies rather than forgetting it, as is so often the
aim. Douglas Gordon is perhaps the best known of artists to engage the operation
of recycling, famously subjecting feature films to extreme temporal dilation:
 Hour Psycho is fairly self-explanatory, while Five Year Drive By
() made the running time of The Searchers () coextensive with its diegetic
time, resulting in one second of the Ford film lasting . hours.
Gordon
has completed numerous multiscreen reedits of films concerning riven identity
and the double, including through a looking glass (), which excerpts
seventy-one seconds of the “You talkin’ to me?” sequence from Taxi Driver,
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (-), which uses Rouben Mamoulian’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (), looping three sequences of transformation
from good to evil in a double projection.
The final operation of remaking involves subjecting a preexisting film to a
cross-medium process of translation. Here, one might invoke Angela Bulloch’s Z
Point (), which translates the closing sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point () into a bank of forty-eight “pixel boxes,” six high and
eight wide to mimic the aspect ratio of mm film. Each box is a fifty-centimeter
glass-fronted square containing within it three fluorescent tubes. Using custom
software, Bulloch’s pixel boxes can produce up to sixteen million colors, as
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 119
many as possible from a computer screen.
Z Point samples one frame from
each second of the excerpt (since the pixel boxes are limited to one change per
second) and translates it into an array of forty-eight large pixels, one for each
box. Color and movement are retained while the representational powers of the
image are obliterated. The result is a pulsing grid that brings together a sense of
bodily rhythm with geometric rigor. Z Point recycles an art cinema classic as
new media artifact, bringing into tension the poles of senescence and novelty
that mark the integration of cinema into the museum since .
Angela Bulloch, Z Point ().
The remakes that engage in translation may remediate old media into new media,
much as takes place in culture at large, but they may also translate cinema
into older media. Examples of such this kind of cross-medium translation are to
be found in Fiona Banner’s transcriptions of Vietnam War films, such as Apocalypse
Now (), a hand-scribbled text measuring some seventeen square meters,
or her artist’s book THE NAM (), which compiles typewritten transcriptions
of Apocalypse Now (), Born on the Fourth of July (),
The Deer Hunter (), Full Metal Jacket (), Hamburger Hill (),
and Platoon () into a single, nearly unreadable text. Pierre Bismuth’s Fol-
120 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
lowing the Right Hand of... series does exactly what its title suggests: the
artist watches a DVD behind a plexiglass sheet and uses a marker to trace a
shaky line that follows the female star’s right hand throughout the film. This is
placed on top of a still of the actress, resulting in a defiled portrait of, for example,
Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté (, remade by Bismuth as Following
the Right Hand of Louise Brooks in Beauty Contest []). The scribbled
line indexes Bismuth’s viewing of the film, its nervous energy pointing to a thorough
redirection of attention away from the narrative progression and towards
the movements of an actress’ right hand. In the translations produced by both
Banner and Bismuth, the labor of spectatorship is made visible in the production
of manually produced artifacts that index the time spent as a viewer.
Precursors
Basing an artwork on an existing cultural product is by no means new, nor is
making use of the gallery space to comment upon the mass medium of cinema.
Strategies of appropriating mass media imagery are very familiar within art
historical discourse, whether one speaks of the Situationist International and
their strategy of détournement or the “Pictures” generation’s interest in the politics
of the sign. It is imperative, however, to make certain distinctions between
these antecedents and the remakes of the s and s.
When Angela Bulloch substitutes the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solaris (Solyaris, ) with her own audio to make Solaris () or dubs
Jean Rouch’s Gare du nord segment of Paris seen by... (Paris vu par..., )
into German or English based on interior and exterior shots and adds scenes
filmed in Vienna to make From the Eiffel Tower to the Riesenrad (),
her gestures have a clear precedent: in , René Viénet, member of the Situationist
International, took the martial arts film Crush (Tang shou tai quan
dao, ) and dubbed his own soundtrack to make Can Dialectics Break
Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?). This is a classic example
of Situationist détournement, that process by which mass cultural products
are “diverted” or “hijacked” towards critical ends, contesting the spectacle
from within. And yet, Bulloch’s use of this operation possesses none of the potency
of the Situationists, none of the desire to appropriate an existing mass
cultural text in an indictment of that realm. For the S.I., détournement is an operation
of radical negation; in a critique of the Tel Quel group’s literary avantguardism,
Guy Debord states, “Not some ‘writing degree zero’ – just the opposite.
Not the negation of style but the style of negation.”
This contestation
must maintain a critical distance towards its object so as to restore “the ancient
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 121
kernel of truth” that might be excavated from amidst the petrified surfaces of
spectacle.
Notably, while the formal operations of some of the strategies of remaking
that have emerged since  resemble those of Situationist détournement, on
the whole they by no means maintain its virulence towards the appropriated
objects, its critical distance from them, nor its focus on negation as a way of
instituting a new totality founded on a recovered truth. The S.I. aimed at nothing
less than cultural revolution, seeing the divide between art and life as an
integral part of the separations that characterized spectacular culture. In this
sense, their militant interventions must be seen as attempting to destroy the
category of art as much as violently contesting mass culture, seeking a Hegelian
Aufhebung that would institute a new totality free of alienation and atomiza-
tion.
Recent artists’ remakes of existing films have abandoned the Situationist
call for the abolition of art as a distinct category and have ceased to view mass
culture as an unqualified villain. Firmly ensconced within the institution of art,
they leave behind negation and totality to instead forge an ambivalent and conflicted
relationship to the fragmentary network of signs that constitutes popular
culture. Today, the act of appropriation in itself guarantees no criticality, but
rather functions as a starting point to open other avenues of investigation, some
of which may entail a critique of media, others not.
An earlier generation of moving image artists – one that included figures
such as Paul Sharits and Michael Snow – interrogated film as film as a turn
away from the ideological enclosures of “the movies.” Now, in addition to the
material of film, which has seen a renewed interest under the specter of obsolescence,
the institution of cinema has emerged as an object of fascination. The multiscreen
projection formats this earlier generation pioneered may be employed,
but many components of the cinematic institution that had previously been rejected
– such as stardom, screenplays, extras, studios, stories, sets, spectators –
are now precisely what is investigated. Artists take up the histories, conventions,
and social functions of cinema as the mass cultural medium responsible
for the production of narratives and experiences shared by a society, something
that demonstrates an affinity with the “Pictures” group of American appropriationists.
However, instead of following the “Pictures” artists in an examination
of the iconography of cinema through the stillness of photography – thereby
freezing circuits of desire and identification into the stasis of a single image to
be held up for analysis – now artists delve into an engagement with moving
images.
In combining multiscreen film and video installations with a suspicious
embrace of mass cultural codes and the poaching of signs, the contemporary
generation synthesizes elements of s expanded cinema with s and
s appropriation.
122 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Artists make use of the pleasures of recognizability as central to the affective
resonance of their work, playing off of a conception of cinema as a storehouse of
communally shared narratives and resurrecting the utopian spark of cinema as
an alternative public sphere. But at the same time, it often surfaces that this
shared cultural memory is also a site of ideological interpellation to be questioned,
as the cinema is seen as a spectacular machine churning out image commodities,
regulating cultural norms, and impacting the way we understand history.
Stemming from this is an irreducible ambivalence towards the mass
cultural texts that are integrated into the production of new works. This ambivalence
must never be taken for indifference, but must be seen as describing
strong forces that refract, splinter, and enter into tension with one another. The
challenge now is to take ambivalence seriously, to see in it an opportunity to
render visible the contradictory libidinal investments elicited by the culture in-
dustries.
This ambivalence is an important response to the collapse of the complicity/
critique divide after postmodernity’s colonization of the last zones of resistance,
the realm of art foremost among them. In a discussion of the work of Pierre
Huyghe, Mark Godfrey writes, “Rarely has an artist associated with a critical
position been canny enough to work with affection, attraction, and amazement
and not just against them.”
This coexistence of a critical position with “affection,
attraction, and amazement” is the affective structure characteristic of the
ambivalent engagement with cinema that marks many strategies of remaking
since . Leaving behind the anti-pleasure polemics of the s and s,
the disavowal of enjoyment has ceased to be a necessary prerequisite for engagement.
Through such ambivalence, these artists rewrite the dominant narratives
of Hollywood into an array of multi-faceted and contradictory stories that
negotiate the borders between truth and fiction, industrial production and personal
experience, visibility and invisibility, fantasy and criticality. Rather than
intervening solely at the level of representational codes, central to many of these
works is an attempt to locate the various vectors that bind subjects to the image
repertoire of popular culture and constitute them as viewing publics.
Like the work of the filmic avant-garde that preceded and paralleled it, the
artists making film installations in the s and s maintained a belief in an
“outside” to ideology. Indeed, the guarantee of a secure, external space from
which one might produce a critique of ideology served as one of the cornerstones
of filmic theories of “political modernism” of this time.
Today, there is
a widespread acknowledgement that one cannot mark out an “outside” to
ideology, with the result that the contestation of narrative, the assaults on representation
and spectacle, and the polemics against cinematic pleasure no longer
stand as viable political strategies. Easy divisions of inside and outside are rejected
in favor of a shifting topology of forces that takes care not to deny the
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 123
involvement of one’s own discursive position within the libidinal and economic
structures of capital. Enjoyment is not at odds with critical engagement; rather,
both coexist. Harnessing the pleasures of Hollywood cinema within practices
that acknowledge the legacies of expanded cinema, Situationist détournement,
and “Pictures” appropriationism, these works try to find a way towards a different
politics of the image. It must be remembered that there are different ways
of being bedfellows with spectacle. The examples of Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers
() and Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out ( Cubic Meters) ()
provided one paradigm in chapter one; now, the time has come to examine a
series of very different engagements with popular culture, engagements that
prove that knowledge can and must be produced from within the culture industries.
For if it doesn’t come from there – a there that is everywhere – where will it
come from?
The False Promises of the “Utopia of Use”
World Trade Center  and the lawsuit it inspired are significant, for they
speak to several of the key issues confronting the remake as a practice in contemporary
art. That the art world has been cheerfully exempt from the increasing
copyright regulation of recent years has not prevented the most prominent
theorization of the remake in contemporary art to see it as a part of a utopian
move towards sharing and a testament to the new activity and freedom afforded
to the consumer by the advent of digital, networked media. To great
popularity and great dispute, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction: Culture as
Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the World sees its title operation as a “neutral,
zero-sum process” wherein “the material [these artists] manipulate is no longer
primary.”
Ignoring the history of appropriation art as embroiled in a politics of
representation, Bourriaud advances a new paradigm of derivative art-making
wherein the work no longer reflects back on its appropriated material in a critical
relation, but instead merely reuses it to advance an emancipatory economy
of sharing that makes the formerly “passive” consumer into an “active” producer
who creates new cultural objects from the availability of the old. We no
longer merely consume media, but take part as active participants. This position
follows from Bourriaud’s  book Relational Aesthetics (translated ), which
links what the author calls “post VCR art” to a “democratization of viewpoints”
made possible by technology. It is a statement that very much echoes Moukarbel’s
concerning the “democratization of storytelling.”
However, where Moukarbel
was intent on using the availability of such technologies in a critique of
the representations of dominant cinema (democratization as allowing for new
124 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
forms of contestation), in both Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction, critique is
left behind in favor of a harmonious community of sharing and the production
of benign social relations. Under such a paradigm, it becomes impossible to take
account of, for example, the ways in which remaking has been employed to
investigate the narrativization of historical events. Political intervention is jettisoned
in favor of a joyous proclamation of neutrality.
Bourriaud draws heavily on the work of Michel de Certeau to champion a
“culture of use or a culture of activity” that allows one to “make do” and better
inhabit the world.
He names the DJ and the programmer as the archetypal
figures of the operation, which proceeds with a neutrality that cannot help but
be enfolded in an affirmation of neoliberal consensus culture.
Bourriaud valorizes
participation and activity without interrogating their character or their
place in structures of domination. As chapter one suggested, following Deleuze
and Foucault, the pervasive form of the administration of power is no longer the
injunction to conform and stay in place (though such forms persist as important
survivals). Rather, there is a constant incitation to participate and circulate. The
inside/outside distinctions of disciplinary power have largely given way to the
diagram of the control society, a robust and flexible network that thrives on
principles of connectivity and communication. As an economy based in material
goods shifts to one founded in services and the creation of experiences, a new
“performative imperative” arises: participation and conviviality are far from
oppositional but, in fact, a new terrain of possible exploitation and expropria-
tion.
The advent of the Internet has undoubtedly changed the relationship between
production and consumption, but differently than the emancipatory thrust of
Bourriaud’s description would suggest. Rather than erasing the difference between
production and consumption, post-Fordist production, as Maurizio Lazzarato
has elaborated, is characterized by a shift to immaterial labor whereby
the act of consumption becomes an integral part of production. Therefore, participation
cannot be seen as inherently oppositional, but is in fact precisely what
is required for the generation of value. As Lazzarato writes, “Participative management
is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the
‘subjective processes’...First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is
authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate,
and so forth.”
Consumers are called upon to invest immaterial products
with value by integrating them into social communication. Here, subjectivity
itself is commodified, as tastes, affects, and desires rather than material labor
become the locus of value production. The consumption of immaterial commodities
is an activity that does not destroy the object but produces its value
through integrating it into the fabric of life. As such, the “culture of activity”
Bourriaud champions must thus be seen not as inherently oppositional but
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 125
rather as native to the relationship between power, labor, and subjectivity that
marks the twenty-first century.
It is in this light that one must read the assertion in Relational Aesthetics that,
“[Modernism] was based on conflict, whereas the imaginary of our day and
age is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences. These days we
are no longer trying to advance by means of conflictual clashes...”
While it
may be true that the old oppositions of modernism no longer hold true – the
lines, for example, between work/play, high/low, and complicity/critique have
been thoroughly blurred – the false permissiveness of neoliberalism is a fatal
problem in Bourriaud’s analysis. The kind of coexistence and cooperation he
valorizes is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize, immanent to immaterial
labor and, as such, to the contemporary mutations of capital.
Postproduction
retains the Situationist term of détournement but cleanses it of the
negativity on which it was founded without acknowledging the conditions
and implications of such a recuperation. Harmony, sharing, and conviviality
become keywords in a paradigm that overwrites a politics of the sign with a
complacency toward the status quo that mirrors, rather than agitates against,
new forms of power.
Conceiving of the reuse of existing products as a “culture of constant activity
based on a collective ideal: sharing” not only buys wholeheartedly into the control
society’s injunction to participate, but also occludes the real existence of
proprietary media, the high financial stakes involved, as well as the fact that
much of the source material has not been “shared,” but rather has been poached
against the will of its original producer, as Paramount’s lawsuit against Moukarbel
makes clear.
There is no disputing the fact that the Internet has made
media available like never before. However, despite such unprecedented access,
as Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker point out, “...the liberation rhetoric of
distributed networks...is a foil for the real workings of power today. The rhetoric
of liberation is also a foil for the real nature of threats.”
Decentralization
diffuses power but does not dissipate it; to buy into the technoromantic myth
of the unqualified freedoms of online culture is to ignore the ways in which
power continues to operate in and through decentralized and distributed net-
works.
Tom McDonough’s consideration of the work of Pierre Huyghe, “No Ghost,”
criticizes Bourriaud for his transposition of de Certeau’s “making do” from
everyday life to the gallery. McDonough writes, “Bourriaud adopts this schema
wholesale and, somewhat paradoxically if not perversely, returns it to the artistic
realm where it originated.”
It is de Certeau himself who reminds us that
the everyday activity can only be understood in relation to the precise circumstances
in which it is deployed, that is to say, in relation to its conditions of
enunciation.
If de Certeau wanted to inject an “art of doing” into everyday
126 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
life – the original French title of The Practice of Everyday Life is Arts de faire – and
addressed his book to the “murmuring voice of societies,” “a common hero, an
ubiquitous [sic] character,”
Bourriaud reverses such a motion by returning to
the gallery and its relatively high-paid cultural producers. He describes an altogether
different context, as if such a transposition would have no effect on the
efficacy of the gesture. This changed site of enunciation allows the asymmetry
in power between strong and weak insisted upon by de Certeau to fade into
obscurity in Bourriaud’s analysis; the international art stars he discusses are by
no means “weak,” but rather are invested with a richness of cultural and financial
capital possessed by only a small elite.
Bourriaud portrays a constant and equal availability of texts and outlets of
expression, drawing on the rhetorics of democratization and emancipation that
still characterize some discourses of online creativity despite their mythic char-
acter.
The elision of the discursive position of the artists equally allows Bourriaud
to ignore how the rigidification of copyright law over the last twenty
years might temper his ideal of sharing precisely because major artists are provided
a substantial degree of protection via their professional status as “fair
users” with gallery-funded legal teams to back up the claim if necessary.
When Brian O’Doherty described the white cube as a “survival compound,” he
meant something very different, but now again the gallery functions as a barrier
between these artists and the possible legal proceedings that could threaten
them in the “real world.”
McDonough understands de Certeau’s notion of “making do” as smacking of
a post-’ defeatism that abandons both imagining an alternative to the status
quo and visible agitation against it in favor of clandestine and temporary actions
that improve one’s quality of life under conditions taken to be perma-
nent.
According to McDonough, both de Certeau and Bourriaud buy into “a
‘utopia of use’ that resists the logic of reification only by recourse to a kind of
petit-bourgeois fantasy of consumption as a realm of personal autonomy.”
Though McDonough does not, one might forgive de Certeau for laying out
ways in which an individual might make the best of it through microinterventions.
However, art is a sphere of relative freedom that does allow for creative
imaginations of alternative modes of life as well for as fierce indictments of existing
conditions, activities that have constituted an important part of the political
function of art throughout the twentieth century. The power relations at
stake are different: the factory worker might lose a job that feeds his family if
he dissents; an artist might make the cover of Artforum or drive up prices. The
arguable resignation of “making do” is problematic but understandable within
de Certeau’s framework; its appropriation by Bourriaud speaks to a much more
troubling renunciation of the political, of the desire for real change, and of the
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 127
possibility that art might provide a valuable space in which to criticize the mass
media.
Remaking Fandom
South African artist Candice Breitz has adapted the found-footage tradition to a
gallery context by producing multi-screen installations that investigate the libidinal
vectors that bind cinema to its public, as well as how they have been impacted
by the recent advent of the fan’s ability to manipulate and remix existing
films. Breitz’s installations ask: what kind of balance exists between control and
freedom when a tool of ideological interpellation such as Hollywood cinema
becomes available for recycling and remixing in new contexts? And what residues
of disciplinary power persist within this institution when it is networked
and malleable? Far from being seen as an obsolescent technology or a historical
set of great directors, here cinema is used to generate the very image of contemporaneity,
producing narratives that are decidedly new; that is, cinema is used
to articulate how the shift to a post-Fordist economy spawns new opportunities
for control as much as freedom. Breitz complicates Bourriaud’s assumption that
all participation is inherently positive by instead excavating the ways in which
the ideological interpellations of cinema persist in and through fan participa-
tion.
In Becoming (), Breitz makes use of seven different romantic comedies,
pruning them down to a key scene involving their female protagonist and removing
the appearance of any other actors.
The work consists of fourteen
monitors positioned in seven groups of two. On one side of each screen, there is
an excerpt from a romantic comedy; on the other, Breitz acts out the star’s role
in black and white and mouths her lines. Due to the piece’s spatial configuration,
the spectator has to move around each of the seven pairs of monitors to
evaluate the effectiveness of each impersonation. Breitz might be said to engage
in the “zero-sum” game of postproduction, reclaiming the pleasures of fan culture
and making them visible and valorized within contemporary art; or, one
might recognize in the artist’s laborious attempt to imitate these actresses a commentary
on the violence of attempting to mold oneself in the image of the star.
Imitation is a central aspect of stardom, as the star both sets a standard to be
followed yet retains an existence as an impossible fantasy projection. Breitz’s
imitation of these female stars requires diligent and purposeful rehearsal, but
also points to the subtle and scarcely noticed imitation that occurs whenever
Hollywood influences fashion, cosmetics, language, or even the way we negotiate
interpersonal relationships.
128 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Candice Breitz, Becoming Drew ().
Becoming – which draws its title from the name of an MTV reality series that
gives fans makeovers to look like their favorite star and produces a reenactment
of one of the star’s music videos – explicitly takes up the relationship between a
digitized and networked cinema available for recycling and remaking and the
false positions of “activity” it may produce. The drained black and white of the
reenactment image, Breitz’s cropped hair, and her plain white shirt all appear in
stark contrast to the lush color of the source films and the costuming of the star.
Unlike Cindy Sherman’s elaborate self-fashionings, Breitz’s reenactments are
spartan. In Postproduction, the script is a jumping-off point for creative endeavor,
but it must also be remembered that a script is something to be followed.
Breitz inhabits this contradictory position, showing how fan freedom and fan
control are in fact two sides of the same story, just as the images of Becoming
are projected onto two sides of the same screen.
What is perhaps most striking about Breitz’s appropriation of these romantic
comedy screenplays is the absence of the artist’s own voice. Becoming makes
use of the soundtrack from the source film, with the result that the Hollywood
texts seem to speak through Breitz’s body, usurping her voice and vernacular in
favor of a global narrative of heteronormative romance. The script is no longer
the locus of a generative freedom, but of an imperative to stay synchronized
with the voices that speak through the dispossessed subject. If according to
Bourriaud’s paradigm, she is the empowered consumer-turned-producer, following
this alternate reading, she has instead become a ventriloquist’s dummy.
The strength of Becoming is that it allows for both readings at once, holding
them in suspension. For even if Breitz’s recycling and reenactment of these romantic
comedies is one that points to the ideological interpellations of popular
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 129
cinema, the mere possibility that such a statement can be made rests on the
activity of a fan/artist who chooses to make use of the availability of new technologies
to create a work that will serve to interrogate such media representations.
In this sense, Breitz’s self-placement as the one who imitates the star is
crucial, as the artist is present both as dupe and as demystifier.
Candice Breitz, Her (-).
In the works Him (-) and Her (-), Breitz creates stuttering kaleidoscopes
of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep by combining clips from various
roles the actors have played throughout their careers. Him makes use of
twenty-three Jacks from forty years; Her brings us twenty-eight Meryls from
thirty years. By dating the works as beginning when the earliest source film
was produced and extending to Breitz’s completion of them in , the artist
playfully accords a historicity to her found material that a single date would
elide. It gives a sense of a devoted fan who has followed the stars through the
twists and turns of a career, through good roles and bad, watching films so
many times as to become familiar with each line and gesture of the performance.
The pieces are displayed in adjacent rooms, each consisting of six
screens arranged in a circle on a single wall, a formation that allows for the
various characters to call out and respond to one another. Breitz blacks out the
130 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
background behind the figures, severing them as much as possible from the
mise-en-scène of the source film. By bringing together these disparate performances
– all of which belong to their own diegetic universes – according to the
rubric of the actor occupying the role, Breitz mobilizes the parallel text that celebrity
always constitutes in our viewing of a film. She assembles such a text of
celebrity for easy inspection, combining common gestures such as Streep’s nail
biting from across dozens of films, as well as highlighting certain motifs that
recur, such as Nicholson’s incessant uncertainty about “who he really is.”
Like
Warhol – the subject of Breitz’s unfinished doctoral dissertation at Columbia
University – Breitz stages the tension between seriality and uniqueness that
characterizes the star, making use of iteration upon iteration in a dizzying
mélange of often quickly edited clips that blend together in a single composite
portrait.
In addition to their function as star studies, Him and Her take up Hollywood’s
constitution of gender roles, a preoccupation evident in the impersonal
pronouns used in the title of the piece. Throughout the work, Meryl Streep
comes to stand in for the idealized-yet-recognizable femininity of Hollywood,
defining herself solely, as one clip from Kramer vs. Kramer () says, in her
role as daughter, mother, and wife. The topic of marriage is a continual reference,
as is self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, Him takes up a very different set of thematic
concerns, such as anger, sex, and as just mentioned, an anxiety over identity
– all of which speak to a particular constitution of American masculinity. In
this interrogation of archetypal norms through exceptional personalities, Him
and Her are the development of earlier works entitled Mother and Father
(both ), which each use six screens placed in a row to form a constellation
of mothers and fathers culled from various Hollywood films.
This allows for
an exploration of gendered parental roles to be explored across a body of films,
letting the viewer witness the father’s hysterical policing of his daughter’s chastity
and the mother’s teary unhappiness and frigidity. By selecting excerpts from
numerous popular films, Breitz highlights the monolithic nature of Hollywood’s
depiction of parental roles. Though the excerpted characters have various surface
level differences, it quickly becomes clear that certain fundamentals about
what constitutes motherhood are shared across films as different as the sappy
Stepmom () and the grotesque Mommie Dearest (). To use Siegfried
Kracauer’s language, they all have the same secret to confess.
As the original
narratives of these films fall away, so do their particularities. One is left with
attributes and words that might stem from a specific movie, but circulate
throughout culture as detached but recognizable signifiers of the essence of
motherhood. Out of six seemingly different Hollywood mothers, Breitz produces
one Mother; particularity gives way to generality in a metamythology.
The individual star performances of Hollywood entertainment lose whatever
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 131
specificity they might have had as they are recuperated back into the archetypes
of which they have always made use.
Breitz has described her practice using the abject metaphor of excretion:
We have no choice...but to consume the cultural produce of global capitalism. But
consumption must be followed by digestion, and digestion must be followed by excretion.
This is a polite way of saying that if we have no choice but to consume what
the mass media feeds us, then we must insist on completing the digestive cycle – we
must insist on the right to chew up, process and regurgitate mass media forms such
that they might service us rather than merely milking us.
The invocation of the abject gets to the confounding of interior and exterior distinctions
that takes place in a work such as this, figuring the way in which they
are borne of the system of image capital that Breitz describes and yet mark out
some difference from it. Breitz uses the availability of commercial DVDs and
editing software to divert performances from their original context, a process
she calls “involuntary acting,” since she “kidnaps” stars and puts them to work
within her own densely woven textile.
Once again, one sees here how Breitz’s
practice would lend itself to Bourriaud’s discussion in Postproduction: the formerly
passive consumer is made active through production. According to such
a reading, these works would be a part of a fan’s remix culture, playfully combining
clips into a new form that creates a utopian space for maneuvering within
the enclosures of mass media. However, more than simply embracing this
supposed freedom, Breitz never loses sight of the force-feeding of mass media
texts she describes in the passage cited above.
Consumption and production are linked but separate activities, with numerous
relations of varied character that can serve to connect the two. This vector
between the consumption of mass media texts and what their spectators do
with them is the central point of inquiry across Breitz’s practice. Rather than
asserting the inherent positivity of participation, she insists on the need to examine
the activity itself. Sometimes it can lead to the possibility of turning
against dominant ideologies, other times it can confirm and reproduce them,
and still more often it can do both at once. There is a striking ambivalence present
that allows Breitz to at once embrace the activities of fandom as offering
something other than a soporific intoxication with the culture industries, but
also to cast a suspicious glance on its hollow promises of emancipation.
Just as the playfulness of Breitz’s reenactments of Hollywood actresses in Becoming
gives way to a sense of violation and confinement of the voice and
body by the norms it would seek to replicate, it is important to note that the
overall experience of viewing Him, Her, Mother, and Father is one of dislocation
resulting from an incessant stammering and twitching. Jerkiness is cultivated,
as Breitz will loop a tiny snippet of dialogue and image over and over so
132 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
as to result in a kind of stutter. Something sinister emerges from within these
entertaining montages. For the spectator, the fun of enjoying the star’s performance
– taking pleasure in the clever correspondences Breitz excavates and
playing the “name that clip” game – is balanced with the realization that such
performances play a key role in the formation of the gender and parental norms
that frequently pass unquestioned. The opposition of critical distance versus entertaining
engagement is breached. There is no denial of the immense pull of
celebrity culture, no assertion by the artist that she is somehow above it or beyond
it, and at times even a real sense that the fan’s reproduction can bend and
twist these texts into something new, different, and oppositional. At the same
time, the mimetic function of the star and the ideological interpellations of the
cinema are constantly called into question. The ambivalence of this work is not
to be mistaken for indifference, but rather is marked by contradiction and the
antagonism of irreconcilable and often asymmetrical forces. The ubiquitous
availability of the star’s image offers itself up for recontextualizations that haggle
with the text of celebrity while embracing it, assert the agency of the fan/
consumer while dismantling it, and revel in the malleability of poached signs
while testifying to the persistence of cinema as an ideological apparatus.
“Room-for-Play”
Breitz makes clear that the activity of the consumer may no longer be held to be
an inherently subversive action that would contest the megaphone of the producer.
Rather, producers call upon their consumers to be active and to invest
their immaterial products with value. As Lazzarato writes,
The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential
use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in
the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms,
and creates the “ideological” and cultural environment of the consumer. This
commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms
the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social
relation.”

Rather than seeing the activity of the consumer as an inherently oppositional or
as a free space of play, this paradigm allows for an understanding of fan/user
activity as value producing. Instead of unproblematically championing the activity
of today’s consumers who download and remix, Lazzarato reminds us
that this is in fact indicative of a colonization of that time once thought to be
free from capitalist exploitation:
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 133
Play...no longer constitutes an alternative to work as domination. The dialectical opposition
between play and work has been transformed into a continuum, of which
play and work are only the two extremes. Between the two, it is possible to arrange a
thousand different ways the coefficients of work and play, autonomy and subordination,
activity and passivity, intellectual and manual labour, which nourish capitalist
valorization.
Given that this paradigm achieves its full realization with Web . technologies
of participation and social networking, why look back at the cinema in order to
discuss a condition largely associated with digital media?
Why is it that the
narrativization of this new mutation of capital takes place through the old medium
of cinema rather than through engagements with new media technolo-
gies?
Of interest here is a peculiar disjunction, an anachronism: cinema – a technology
that has historically been aligned with a unidirectional vector of mass consumption
and the enclosures of disciplinary power – becomes the primary way
that contemporary art speaks about a diagram of power (control) and an organization
of labor (immaterial) that are typically aligned with digital technologies.
One finds this at play in Breitz’s work, as well as in numerous projects by
Pierre Huyghe. Why this asynchrony? One might venture that it is because cinema
has historically participated in the colonization of leisure time, making it a
major site of immaterial labor before it became increasing dominant over manual
labor. When immaterial labor produces a “social relation,” it is engaged in
the production of subjectivity immanent to a process of capitalist valorization.
The film industry has always relied on the affective investments of its audiences
to give its products value, occupying their free time with activities that would
not merely produce value for the studios but also reproduce ideology, as Breitz
makes clear. The cinema is a technology of reproduction in a double sense: it
reproduces images and it reproduces ideology through these images, creating
subjects. The cinema epitomizes Lazzarato’s description of the immaterial commodity
as something that “enlarges, transforms, and creates the ‘ideological’
and cultural environment of the consumer.” Today, as cinema is increasingly
digitized and available for fan manipulation, it presents an especially strong
site at which to diagnose the dissolution of work and play, autonomy and sub-
ordination.
If all of this provides possible reasons that artists might turn to cinema to
explore the increased opportunities for control and exploitation that stem from
the centrality of immaterial labor in what Yann Moulier Boutang has called
“cognitive capitalism,” there might be other, very different reasons that cinema
– rather than television or digital media – emerges as the privileged way of
interrogating this transition.
Immaterial labor makes new zones of coloniza-
134 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
tion possible, but it also makes new forms of resistance possible. There is always
a certain contingency to the consumer’s participation in the creation of value, a
space that is opened up for diversion and self-determination that one sees distinctly
paralleled in theorizations of the collective reception of cinema. Lazzarato
again: “What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot
remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is established
between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communica-
tion.”
The event is an unforeseeable and singular force that is marked by the
opening of potentiality. As such, the ways in which spectators reproduce the
immaterial commodities they consume can give way to negotiation from within
the colonized space of capital. This is not a “making do” that attempts to get by
within unchangeable structures, but a negotiation that takes place immanent to
the production of value.
This understanding of film reception as a node of interconnection proposes
another, alternate reason why the old cinema might be used to talk about the
new diagram of power: there was a time when the collective mode of spectatorship
proper to cinema was endowed with a utopian potential. Walter Benjamin
wrote: “To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate
environment – the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations,
and enjoy their leisure – are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible,
meaningful, and passionate way.”
Though much has changed in the institution
of cinema since Benjamin’s time of writing, it would be difficult to find another
“prism” that might fulfill the same function today. For Benjamin, this refractive
“room-for-play” [Spiel-Raum] made available by the cinema was one of
its most important and progressive attributes.
It is a space that is resurrected
and redoubled by artists remaking the products of film history, as they optimize
the prismatic and transformative ability that already resided in cinema by transforming
existing films in turn. If, for Benjamin, the cinema could take what was
second nature and deliver it over to a space of eventfulness, unforeseeability,
and the generation of new attitudes, the practice of remaking cinema shifts this
activity into a second-order system.
When artists call upon the shared narratives of cinema, they find within them
a Janus face: they are mechanisms of ideological interpellation but they also
open a possibility of shared experience. Collectivity thus emerges as a distinctly
double-sided notion, a concept that may function as a site of domination but
may also carry within it the utopian spark Benjamin gleaned. This hints at a
possible reason that the cinema has had such a forceful appeal for artists in the
s and s. Cinema undoubtedly partakes in the Adornian paradigm of
mass culture as mass deception, but it also functions as a horizon of collective,
public experience.
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 135
Chrissie Iles has suggested that, “[A]rtists’ use of film in the s, particularly
popular Hollywood film, is partly to do with wanting to engage with, and
perhaps influence, the connective tissue that film creates, and participate in a
common language of communication.”
The value attached to this “common
language of communication” is decidedly ambivalent. As an agent of standardization,
the commonality generated by film spectatorship might be thought to be
inextricable from its functioning as an ideological apparatus, teaching its spectators
to be “good subjects” at the movies by disguising highly cultural and
historically specific notions of race, class, gender, decorum, and so on, as natural.
And yet, the fervor with which artists have returned to the products of film
history as a reservoir of this “connective tissue” suggests a desire to understand
cinema as a repository of cultural memory and shared experience despite its
ideological workings – or perhaps because of them, so that they might be pried
open for negotiation. One finds a distinct effort to work through the vicissitudes
of the relationship between subjectivity and spectacle. Rather than throwing the
cinematic baby out with the ideological bathwater, so to speak, remaking cinema
emerges as a way of gleaning a utopian possibility of belonging from within
a realm once dismissed as suspect.
Miriam Hansen has drawn upon Benjamin to outline the ways in which cinema
functioned as an alternative public sphere during its first decades, a potential
that was increasingly quashed by the consolidation of Hollywood hegemony
and the increasing disciplining of spectatorship.
The mobilization of
references to cinema in contemporary art recalls this emphasis on the publicity
of the institution, which now takes on a renewed importance given the atomization
of spectatorship proper to electronic media. One must historicize both Hansen’s
intervention and the tendency of artists to espouse a similar view of the
cinema. Now that cinema has definitively ceded its cultural dominance, the
promises of this modernist utopia may be recalled, and the redemptive possibilities
of cinema’s status as a shared vernacular resurrected.
A statement from Pierre Huyghe, who has worked extensively with both cinema
and questions of immaterial labor, exemplifies this view of the institution:
“A film is a public space, a common place. It is not a monument but a space of
discussion and action. It’s an ecology.”
The preceding chapter argued that artists
such as Matthew Buckingham and Tacita Dean interrogate untaken paths of
film history and excavate the ruins of utopias that might have been. Despite the
very different concerns of the artists in this chapter, one might venture that
these remakes also attempt to resuscitate the failed utopia of cinema in their
insistence on the public, intersubjective space opened by the shared nature of
cinematic narratives. Both the promises and the failures of film history are invoked
in an effort to reimagine collectivity anew without forgetting the ways in
which the radical potential of cinema was marshalled into a powerful ideologi-
136 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
cal apparatus. From within a space of commonality, these transformative works
can open possibilities of reassessment, turning the spectacle in on itself by confronting
the gaps and fissures that puncture and rend its attempt at totality.
The insistence on recovering the utopian potential of collective reception that
had been dissipated by cinema’s role as a disciplinary technology becomes possible
under the specter of a perceived crisis of the institution. While the uses of
mm discussed in the previous chapter respond to the superannuation of celluloid
as a material substrate, practices of remaking take up the notion of cinema
as a lost object at the institutional level. The many references to classical
Hollywood cinema function as a shared cultural memory and as a site of collective
experience that is now perceived as lacking. In , Time magazine proclaimed
“You” the person of the year in a gesture that explicitly linked the individualist
thrust of the s and s to the popularity of YouTube as a new
venue of personalized image consumption. While it is beyond the scope of this
study to speculate on the new forms of collectivity and publicity that might be
made possible by that website and other comparable developments, there is no
avoiding the fragmentary and dispersed nature of online media when compared
to the mass reception of the classical Hollywood cinema. The return to
classical Hollywood in art since  provides a way of excavating an experience
of collectivity stemming from a shared reception of media at a time when
images are most often consumed individually and directed towards increasingly
specific niche markets.
VCR Memories
The many works that Douglas Gordon has made in reference to Alfred Hitchcock
take up old Hollywood cinema as a lost image regime, fixating on the director
as a kind of hinge between cinema in its classical incarnation and the
many transformations to which it has been subjected since its disintegration. As
Raymond Bellour has put it, for Gordon, Hitchcock represents “the ironic and
fascinated demiurge that engineered with an unequalled consciousness the
mediatized art of possessing his public through image and sound, and did so in
a cinema pushed from then on towards television.”
This final assertion concerning
the relationship between Hitchcock’s cinema and television is key. Hitchcock’s
oeuvre includes multiple, seemingly contradictory responses to the disintegration
of classical cinema: he broke down classical norms in his films – notably,
Psycho – and produced TV shows, but also participated in technological novelties
designed to maintain cinematic hegemony over this competing medium.
These responses position Hitchcock definitively on the cusp between one cinChapter
3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 137
ema and another, straddling a moment of intense transition – precisely the sort
of condition in which cinema found itself again in the mid-s as it reached its
one-hundredth birthday. For Laura Mulvey, Psycho might be the last film of the
classical cinema, “stand[ing] on the edge of the divide” between an old Hollywood
and what it has become in the years since the film’s release in : “The
crisis in the old Hollywood film industry, caught at a crossroads, faced with its
own mortality, gave [Hitchcock] the opportunity to write its epitaph, but also to
transcend its conventions and create something startling and new.”
In 
Hour Psycho, perhaps the best-known remake of the past two decades, Gordon
telescopes this past moment of transition with that of the present, confronting
the possibilities of a VHS cinephilia while fetishistically overvaluing the director
who both emblematized and reflexively interrogated the institution in its
classical form.
Douglas Gordon,  Hour Psycho ().
The exhibition specifications Alfred Hitchcock laid out for the theatrical release
of Psycho would be virtually impossible to apply to Gordon’s remake. Through
lobby posters, special trailers, and the cooperation of movie theater owners,
Hitchcock instituted a special policy for the film. Perhaps as a publicity stunt or
perhaps out of fear the audience would be disappointed if they arrived to find
the female star already dead, Hitchcock required spectators to show up on time
138 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
or they would be refused admission. In an era of moviegoing when it was common
to duck in and out of screenings at will, such a practice was unheard of. As
a result, Hitchcock has often been credited – perhaps wrongly – with singlehandedly
changing habits of film spectatorship.
With  Hour Psycho, Gordon
changes the protocols of spectatorship once again, altering the way the
spectator views this most familiar of films by eliminating its soundtrack,
stretching its duration to the titular twenty-four hours, and projecting it on a
translucent screen that cuts through the center of the gallery space like a knife.
The spectator is free to walk around the image, which also is visible in reverse
on the recto of the screen, lending the work a sculptural quality.
Philip Monk has written of the relationship between the temporal distension
of  Hour Psycho and the film’s “symbolic condensation” in the iconic shower
scene. For Monk, the slowed version “denies the pleasure of this sight: it takes
too long to reach this ‘climax.’”
Given the unique position Psycho occupies in
the disciplining of spectatorship and the requirement to watch a film start-tofinish,
in addition to this instance of denial in Gordon’s appropriation of Hitchcock,
one must add another: no spectator, save for an incredibly patient insomniac
lucky enough to be at a gallery staying open all night, will be able to show
up “on time” for  Hour Psycho, nor see it in its entirety.
Viewing the work
is a necessarily fragmentary experience; even staying for  minutes, the original
duration of the film, will result in seeing what used to be about nine minutes
of it. This has led some critics to see it as a “celebration of peripatetic mobility”
that overcomes the physical paralysis of the cinema.
The assignments of mobility
and immobility that marked movie theater spectatorship here exchange
places, as now, instead of an immobile spectator seated in front of a moving
image, one finds a mobile spectator who moves around a relatively immobilized
image. According to such a reading,  Hour Psycho is a critical intervention
that dismantles the visual pleasure of Hollywood and liberates the viewer
from the disciplined spectatorship of the movie theater.
It would be easy to understand  Hour Psycho in this way, to see the installation
as an attempt to demystify the manipulative powers of narrative cinema.
However, as elaborated in chapter one, the perambulation of the gallery spectator
by no means guarantees a critically “active” viewer. And what of the claim
that Gordon’s use of slow motion might tear the viewer out of absorption and
into a distanced, intellectual engagement with Psycho? Daniel Birnbaum advances
this position by comparing Gordon’s work to the anti-illusionism of Peter
Gidal, writing that, “Here nothing is hidden, and the tools are displayed in
such a fashion that nobody can forget that this is all highly artificial stuff, and
that there is nothing natural about the ways stories are told on the screen
through complex editing technique intent on effacing the marks of the editing
slice.”
There is no dispute that  Hour Psycho refuses the pleasures on
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 139
which Hitchcock’s film rests. But, in a manner that puts it greatly at odds with
Gidal’s anti-representationalism, the work retains a distinct investment in the
pleasures of the image. In Gordon’s installation, there is no refusal of iconophilia,
but simply a substitution of one kind of pleasure in the image for another.
Instead of viewing  Hour Psycho as a series of denials, it should be understood
as an analysis of the transformations to which cinematic pleasure is subject
when classic films are watched on video, an analysis made possible by importing
VHS-based cinema into the museum and rendering it gigantic. For
instead of holding a fascination with the cinematic image under suspicion, 
Hour Psycho uses the analytic powers of slow motion to fetishize detail and
monumentalize a new form of cinephilic spectatorship, that of the VCR and the
remote control.
These domestic media technologies played an important role in the genesis of
the installation. Gordon explains how the project came to be:
In  I had come home to see my family for Christmas and I was looking at a video
of the TV transmission of Psycho. And in the part where Norman (Anthony Perkins)
lifts up the painting of Suzanna and the Elders and you see the close-up of his eye
looking through the peep-hole at Marion (Janet Leigh) undressing, I thought I saw
her unhooking her bra. I didn’t remember seeing that in the VCR version and thought
it was strange, in terms of censorship, that more would be shown on TV than in the
video so I looked at that bit with the freeze-frame button, to see if it was really
there.
In search of a cinephilic fragment, Gordon used the capabilities of home viewing
technologies to slow the film and attempt to find the desired image.
With
a video dubbed off of a televised broadcast of the film, the artist went in search
of a memory, perhaps one of adolescent desire. Gordon has remarked that,
“Slow motion is truly the desire to see what is hidden, it’s very erotic.”
Erotic,
but also marked by death: here one finds a sadistic impulse of possession that
returns the liveliness of cinema to the quietus of the photograph. This is not a
temporal protraction that would produce a distanced, critical commentary, but
a libidinally charged penetration of the film that recalls the violent effort to tame
life evoked in Psycho’s taxidermy birds and the embalmed corpse of the
mother. Slow motion is here employed in its capacity to make possible a kind
of viewing not afforded by a film rushing through the projector with little regard
for a spectator who might want to return to a favorite scene or review a
line of dialogue. Mulvey has described this form of spectatorship, designating it
“possessive”: “With electronic or digital viewing, the nature of the cinematic
repetition compulsion changes. As the film is delayed and thus fragmented
from linear narrative into favorite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to
hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image.”
In  Hour Psycho,
140 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
each image is present as a still for about half a second before giving way to the
next, allowing for the spectator to grasp filmic instants, but only through their
mutilation.
Videotape is not merely the inspiration for  Hour Psycho, but is also key to
the work’s material and aesthetic dimensions. Working in the early s before
the rise of DVDs, Gordon produced the piece using a commercially available
VHS tape and an industrial Panasonic VCR that plays at a speed of roughly
two frames per second.
The artist did nothing to alter the tape itself; his intervention
took place on the level of technologies of spectatorship. Amy Taubin
compares the use of slow motion in  Hour Psycho to Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom,
the Piper’s Son (), but Gordon’s work is far removed from this optical
reprinting of individual frames for it makes no material alteration to the video-
tape.
Her comparison to Warhol’s early films is more accurate (despite the fact
that they make no use of found footage), for here sound film was projected at
silent speed so as to create slow motion at the moment of exhibition. However,
neither one of these comparisons captures the centrality of video to  Hour
Psycho. The use of the VHS format causes a significant degradation of the image
when compared to a mm print, made especially evident by the large-scale
projection of the image, a scale for which VHS is by no means suited.  Hour
Psycho is not merely Psycho slowed to an approximate duration of twentyfour
hours; it is also an unabashedly video-based copy of Psycho slowed to an
approximate duration of twenty-four hours. Along with inserting  Hour Psycho
into an existing history of found footage and slow motion, its relationship
to the home video technologies that made it possible must be emphasized.
Though it was certainly possible for non-professionals to make copies of films
before the popularization of the VCR, it was difficult and required both expensive
equipment and technical knowledge that few amateurs possessed. The
mass marketing of home video technologies made the bootlegging of movies a
real possibility for the first time, leading to the  Sony versus Universal lawsuit,
popularly known as the “Betamax case.” Home video marks the first time
that movies could be dubbed and manipulated by the average viewer, inducing
an anxiety on the part of the studios as to the ability to protect their intellectual
property. It is significant that when Gordon returned to his parents’ house at
Christmastime, it was a copy of Psycho recorded off of television that he chose
to review – it was a VHS copy of a televised copy of a mm film, already two
steps removed from the original format.
The ability to produce private copies and shift formats is central to  Hour
Psycho. It makes monstrous a VHS copy of Psycho and shifts formats again,
this time to a gallery installation. Such activities are inextricably linked to ways
in which spectators’ relations to cinema changed after the domestic use of videotape.
The VHS format, which incidentally owes much of its early success to
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 141
the pornography industry, allowed illicit channels of tape circulation to
emerge.
As Lucas Hilderbrand has suggested, “[B]ootlegging is exemplary of
videotape: it foregrounds the technology as a recording format, it exposes the
formal degeneration of the signal, it stresses the importance of access, and raises
issues of intellectual property rights.”
Though  Hour Psycho does not in
fact produce a new copy of Hitchcock’s film (it exhibits a commercially available
copy under unusual circumstances to change the parameters of aesthetic experience),
it monumentalizes bootleg aesthetics to highlight precisely these attributes
of videotape. Unlike early artists’ uses of the medium, which often foregrounded
the technical possibilities of closed-circuit video, feedback, and realtime
playback, here video is investigated as a social technology that makes cinema
both mutable and available within the home.
 Hour Psycho is an artifact of a post-VHS cinephilia, exploiting the increased
playback control afforded to the viewer by that technology, as well as
making visible the ramifications for image quality and copyright that result
from its capacity for dubbing. The copy cannot help but throw the original into
crisis, and yet it also expands the reach of that object, disseminating it in new
contexts. Dominique Païni has called VHS an “antibody” against the dissolution
of cinephilia.
If this is true, it is an antibody that fights the immune system
as much as the virus that affects it. It makes possible obsessive re-viewings
of films and a greater access to the products of film history, but does so through
a degraded image and CinemaScope frames subject to pan-and-scan. Though
thankfully these qualities have been minimized by the advent of DVDs, there is
nonetheless a discernible loss (of scale, of attention, of publicity, of historicity)
that still accompanies the increased access and control afforded by home viewing
technologies.  Hour Psycho captures the contradictions of this new cinephilia,
and does so by rendering these private rituals of image consumption
gigantic, taking them back out into the public sphere for examination thanks to
the portability of video. It combines the large-scale projection and collective reception
of the cinema with newer, home video practices of copying and altered
playback to create a hybrid aggregate that brings into relief the tension between
its constituent parts.
While  Hour Psycho carries weight as a conceptual gesture, it must be
emphasized that the work also possesses an important phenomenological dimension.
Gordon has discussed the experience of viewing  Hour Psycho as
one of a riven temporality: “The viewer is catapulted back into the past by his
recollection of the original, and at the same time he is drawn into the future by
his expectation of an already familiar narrative...a slowly changing present
forces itself in between.”
The installation draws upon the viewer’s memory of
the original film for its appeal and its success, calling upon him or her to contextualize
and give meaning to the slowed snippet in relation to a larger whole
142 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
recalled from past viewings. If  Hour Psycho incessantly summons the past,
its future can be difficult to access since any sense of anticipation is frustrated by
viscous slowness. Even the future Gordon describes in the above quotation remains
a matter of pastness: it is generated out of the viewer’s previously established
familiarity with the film. Any true sense of futurity, of time moving forward
in a meaningful way, is palpably lacking. Temporal progression splinters
into a succession of disjoined instants that are exhausting to assemble into a
continuous trajectory. While viewing the work, it can be difficult to anticipate
what will happen next, even for a viewer intimately familiar with Psycho. The
grueling pace of the film and the absence of the soundtrack disrupt the patterns
of editing and the narrative cues that would normally serve to structure spectatorial
expectation. Anticipation brings frustration more than anything else, leaving
the viewer stalled in the “slowly changing present,” weighed down by
memories of the past.
As a result,  Hour Psycho possesses none of the suspense that marks the
original. While this appears to pit the dilation of time against the functioning of
suspense, temporal protraction is in fact central to the building of such tension,
particularly in Hitchcock’s cinema.
 Hour Psycho does away with suspense
by hyperbolizing the very same temporal techniques on which it depends,
making Gordon’s alteration of the film an exaggerated allegory of its
own temporality. Without suspense to infuse time with desire,  Hour Psycho
might be thought to possess no affective resonance for its spectator in its current
form, just nostalgia for the film it remakes. This however, is far from the case.
While the installation lacks suspense, it does maintain a relationship to the eroticization
of time. However, instead of the erotic delay of suspense, this temporal
eroticism is linked to a freezing of the film into a slowed, fetishistic crawl as
described above with reference to Mulvey’s notion of the “possessive spectator”
– with the important difference, of course, that the viewer of  Hour Psycho
has none of the control Mulvey ascribes to such a spectator.
Out of the degeneration of narrativity and suspense, these other possessive
pleasures are cultivated. With each frame lasting approximately half a second,
the enduring present of  Hour Psycho is a present of scrutiny, one in which
each frame of the film offers itself to the viewer for a moment before passing on.
This present is not the present of the unfolding of the film’s diegesis; attempting
to follow a developing narrative would quickly exasperate the viewer. Rather, it
is the present of the spectator’s perceptual encounter with the cinema itself, redoubled
by the past memory of seeing Psycho. Because the spectator is severed
from absorption in the diegesis and the soundtrack has been eliminated, a hyperawareness
of detail and minute changes sets in. As the extreme slowness
works to defamiliarize these recognizable images, sometimes a perfectly normal
continuity cut can become unexpectedly surprising, introducing the eventfulChapter
3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 143
ness of kairos into the dull crawl of chronos. It is as if the work were obeying
what Pascal Bonitzer has designated to be a law of Hitchcockian narrative: “the
more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar or conventional, the most liable it
is to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins
to ‘turn against the wind.’”
The Foreign Correspondent () reference is
apposite here, as the uncanniness of  Hour Psycho is, like the windmills
turning against the wind, a matter of aberrant movement. The intensity of the
slow motion strips the film of the terror it once induced but introduces a new
feeling, the eerie return of the familiar made strange. These moments appear
suddenly and without warning, possessing nothing of the gradually augmenting
intensity one associates with Hitchcockian suspense. These jarring instants
constitute a kind of cinephilic detail that protrudes from the text as a point of
interest for the attentive spectator. They serve to puncture the empty time of 
Hour Psycho with bursts of revelation that telescope past and present viewings,
bringing together the movie theater, the VCR, and the gallery (and wherever
else the viewer might have previously watched Psycho) into a single, temporally
disjointed experience of cinema.
In a seemingly simple gesture,  Hour Psycho effects a complex triangulation
of issues of technology, temporality, and spectatorship. The represented
time of Psycho – the time of the narrative – is overtaken by the time of the
apparatus and the time of reception. These temporalities come into tension
with one another, as the regimented slow motion evinces a patient regularity
that contrasts with the contingent meandering of the viewer around the room.
As the viewer wanders around the sluggish movements of the work, she will
cross over to the other side of the screen and see a mirror reflection of Hitchcock’s
iconic images, creating an even stronger sense of defamiliarization and
disorientation than had already been induced by the stagnation of the image, as
they nearly match a memory of an earlier viewing but not quite. But of course,
in memory things are never exactly as they really were. Anthony McCall has
noted that, “With Douglas Gordon’s work, there is a strong element of nostalgia
for a particular period of Hollywood, a classical period that never actually existed
in fact.”
It may not have existed then, but it certainly exists now. This
idea of classical cinema, and indeed, of a golden age of cinema in general, is
retroactively produced in the present amidst fears of the institution’s future.
 Hour Psycho is an encounter with extreme slowness in a culture of increasing
speed and also an encounter with cinema in an era when, as A.O. Scott
has pithily remarked, in Hollywood, “Auteur is French for unemployed.”

Hour Psycho replaces the animation of cinema with the mortification of the
still and does so through a regime of viewing largely thought to be responsible
for the death of that cinema, the VCR. And yet, it by no means asserts such
developments as lamentable. Rather, it proposes that such a mode of spectator-
144 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
ship can cull new pleasures from an old cinema. It enacts the very kinds of
transformations to which cinema is now subject, but does so with a reflexivity
that allows for an assessment of what is at stake in the contemporary cinematic
migration. The individual spectator is engaged in a comparison between the
“then” of Psycho and the “now” of its gallery-based remake that is equally a
comparison between the “then” and the “now” of moving image culture. 
Hour Psycho is a swollen emblem of commemoration, offering a public performance
of grief that would be taken up by numerous artists throughout the
s. Even Gordon himself would resuscitate the work with ’s  hour
psycho back and forth and to and fro, a double-screen projection that plays
the slowed-down film forward on one screen and backward on the other.
In the art of the s and s, the obsession with remaking cinema may be
understood as indicative of an anxiety over the proliferation of digital media
and the attendant effects it would have on the cinema and a simultaneous embrace
of the new possibilities offered by these technological developments. But
as this chapter has suggested, this obsession with remaking cinema has a symptomatic
meaning that goes beyond a concern for the medium in and of itself. In
its general usage, a medium is defined as “an agency or means of doing something,”
“an intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed.” In
their repurposing of Hollywood movies, these artists mobilize cinema as a medium
in this sense of the word: they use it to grasp at something else, as a way
of relating to history and of recovering an imagined collectivity felt to be lacking.
Recycling and citation are aesthetic strategies most often associated with
postmodernism and its accompanying atrophy of history and swell of amnesia.
In the practices discussed throughout this chapter, however, these techniques
are put to work within a framework that insists that media images, after they
have aged, might in fact work with rather than against attempts to recover a
memory of collective experience and a relationship to the past.
The remake of contemporary art emerges as the inverted twin of the Hollywood
remake; that is, rather than remaking the ever-same with a false promise
of novelty, since the s, artists have been remaking old Hollywood films so
as to explode what resides latent within them and put them in service of the
present. Daney worried that only the mythologies of cinema would be kept and
remade, perpetuating the ever-same in the guise of the ever-new. These artists,
by contrast, remake the mythologies of cinema to sometimes indicate what the
repetitions of Hollywood might elide, to other times serve as an act of mourning,
and still others, to do both at once. Whether this is accomplished by sharply
diverging from the host text, such as Becoming, or by repeating it almost exactly,
such as World Trade Center , such works attempt to work within
the interstices of dominant cinema rather than refusing it outright. The remake,
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 145
which is itself a process of translation, is used to interrogate the processes that
translate experiences and events into images, questioning the assumptions,
omissions, and affects that reside therein.
With ambivalence as their primary affective mode, such practices parasitically
make use of the pleasures of dominant cinema while contesting their very
foundation. The function of cinema as a site of affective labor and ideological
reproduction remains central, and yet a certain “room for play” is opened that
makes use of cinema as a common cultural vernacular and a site at which mass
media representations become integrated into subjective experience in a way
that might disrupt the dominant order. This ambivalent structure of feeling provides
a way of acknowledging that there is no outside from which one might
critique the representations of the mass media; rather, these representations are
understood to make up the fabric of our everyday lives. Though these artists
take up Hollywood cinema as an industry that concocts fantasy simulations for
the masses, they locate other possibilities for the moving image alongside and
within its function as image commodity. These artists embrace cinema due to its
status as a vast cultural commons, a lowest common denominator that comprises
a shared vernacular that connects subjects to representations and to each
other. They engage in acts of filmophagy, cannibalizing Hollywood – sometimes
violently, sometimes playfully – in order to reflect on the mediation of experience,
something that engages both power and pleasure. Recognizing the extent
to which Hollywood functions as dream factory, as myth factory, as history factory,
many of the artists producing derivative works turn to cinema as a site that
crystallizes the pleasures and horrors of capitalist societies of control, finding in
it a synecdoche for a spectacle that is inescapable.
Mulvey writes: “Just as Psycho, in , marked a final staging post in the
history of the studio system as a basis for the Hollywood film industry,  Hour
Psycho, like an elegy, marks a point of no return for the cinema itself.”
It is
true, there is no going back. In very different ways, the works discussed in this
chapter all serve to memorialize a particular age of cinema as over and gone,
and yet summon it as a “connective tissue” that might have something to offer
in the present. The much-vaunted “death of cinema” never really means the
death of cinema full stop, but the death of a certain idea of cinema. When Douglas
Gordon proclaims that the cinema is dead, he does so very much in the same
way as another figure who has consistently promulgated the idea, Jean-Luc
Godard: he declares cinema dead while at the same time continuing to make
cinema. Drawing on a nostalgia that calls upon the products of film history as a
reservoir of collective memory, these artists come to terms with the passing of
one cinema while laying the ground for the birth of another. Next to the continuation
of blockbuster spectacle in the multiplexes, this “othered cinema” is
emerging, often marked by an interest in what the cinema once was, but also
146 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
actively contributing to what it will become. For within all of the reflections on
the senescence of cinema, there is also a trajectory that moves forward to clear a
space for a new cinema of the gallery, a cinema of artists who will continue to
push the boundaries of what is possible with the moving image as cinema
moves into its second century.
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives 147
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the
Truth of Fiction
Every film is a fiction film.
– Christian Metz
Every film is a documentary.
– Bill Nichols
Upon entering Omer Fast’s The Casting (), two screens hang from the ceiling
and confront the viewer with tableaux vivants of a casting session. It is the
beginning of the work’s fourteen-minute loop, and the action is taking place on
a soundstage. A man with chin-length hair and wearing a plaid shirt is in the
middle of an audition, responding to questions asked by another man seated
behind a video camera. The images appear to be still photographs, so this dialogue
is delivered in voice-over, invoking the formal system of Chris Marker’s
La Jetée (). But looking closely, one notices that this is not a montage of
stills, but rather a series of shots in which the actors attempt to hold frozen
poses. Eyes blink and hands quiver. Like La Jetée, however, the organization
of these tableaux follows a logic similar to that of continuity editing: when a
character speaks via voice-over, the image track cuts in for a medium close-up,
and shot/reverse-shot structures are used to depict conversational exchange.
One finds a contamination of media here, an exemplary instance of what Raymond
Bellour has termed the entre-image or “between-image”; between media,
between stillness and movement, The Casting stakes out a strange formal system
founded in principles of contamination and a lack of unity.
The interviewer asks the man if he likes improvising and suggests that they
give it a try. The man agrees, and a story begins. Or rather, two stories unfold,
woven together through the shifting reference point of the pronoun and
through narrative linkages. The man intertwines a story of his experiences as a
U.S. Army soldier stationed in Iraq with that of a disastrous first date with a
self-mutilating girl at Christmastime. He says, “I had met a German girl, a beautiful
redheaded German girl and I didn’t know that she was completely and
absolutely insane.” As he speaks, the images on the screens visualize his narrative
in the same almost-frozen tableaux. On the left, there is a small house in
Germany; on the right, a beautiful redhead smokes a cigarette, her face bathed
in pink light. He continues, “She would stand on the side of the road as we’d
drive past.” The “she” here at first seems to refer back to the German redhead,
but the images that accompany the sentence tell a different story. One screen
shows a Humvee parked in the desert, the other a Muslim woman wearing a
khimār with a Humvee approaching in the distance. This transition introduces a
second story, in which the man recounts his experiences as a soldier in the Iraq
War. It focuses on what he calls “probably one of [his] worst days,” when he
shot at a windshield to scare the driver into stopping, not realizing the car was
full. The act resulted in the death of a young man in the backseat. This narrative
is braided together with that of the redhead and her mental instability. She asks
him to hurt her, professes her love for him though they have just met, and undresses
to reveal numerous self-inflicted scars covering her body – an unveiling
that functions almost as a displaced visualization of the way in which psychic
scars of the shooting continue to plague the soldier. At times, the casting director
interrupts with a question, such as “Are you afraid?” or “How did you know
you weren’t dreaming?”
Omer Fast, The Casting ().
At the end of the story, we learn that our narrator has been unsuccessful in his
audition. The casting director tells him that his story was too long, that he isn’t
looking for a political angle. Curiously, he goes on to say, “I’m interested basically
in the way that experience is turned into memory and the ways that memories
become stories, the ways that memories become mediated, they become
recorded and broadcasted and things like this” – a question that, as World
Trade Center  () suggested, is intensely political indeed. A discernible
element of contradiction has entered the voice-over, suggesting that perhaps
something is awry. The remark reads like an artist’s statement by Fast, someone
who, as noted in chapter three, interviewed Schindler’s List () extras to
150 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
make Spielberg’s List (). This is fitting, indeed, since the voice of the casting
director/interviewer belongs to none other than Fast himself.
When the viewer walks around to the reverse side of the screens, another
perspective on the soundtrack is revealed, quite different than that available
when one first enters the black box. The Casting is a two-screen installation,
but a quadruple projection. On the other side of the screens, rather than the
elaborate mise-en-scène of the projections visible when one first enters the
room, each projection shows a talking head, one of a young sergeant in the U.S.
Army and the other of the artist. The two come together to form the shot/reverse
shot of an interview. The dialogue that had been in a relation of voice-over with
the two frontal projections here is synchronized. The audition is recontextualized
as an interview, fiction meets documentary, and the same words are given
a radically different meaning due to their accompaniment by different images.
The high-gloss, professional actors, and vibrant color of the front projections
give way to a relatively muted video aesthetic showing two regular people discussing
difficult memories. What had appeared as fictional improvisation now
appears as the painful recollection of lived trauma.
To make The Casting, Fast interviewed numerous soldiers returning from
the Iraq War, but chose to work with the stories of one man in particular. And
yet, these stories are not faithfully relayed. Rather, as Fast put it, “I used the
interview almost as a pool of words from which to edit new sentences and new
thoughts that were not said in any interview.”
Fast espouses a conception of
the interview that foregoes any link to objective truth in favor of approaching it
as malleable discourse that may be recombined at will, insisting on the ability of
montage to endow an inherently variable utterance with meaning. The prominence
of the jump cut in the interview projections foregrounds the constructedness
of each sentence. What is initially apprehended as a continuous voice-over
is revealed to be a Frankensteinian assemblage of conversational snippets. Dialogue
that had been heard as seamless speech is now invaded by strange tics
and intonations that are only noticeable when accompanied by the visual discontinuity
of the jump cuts. In particular, the interviewer’s rejection of the story
near the end of the loop (“I think it’s too long, people’s attention span is not that
long”) is revealed to be fully fabricated out of a quick succession of edits that
are almost audibly – but far from visually – seamless. As the viewer moves
around the work, he or she is able to blend together the documentary interviews
with their spectacular dramatization, mixing these two modes of representation
in a purposeful contamination of the complex affects induced by testimony
on the one hand and fiction on the other.
This hybrid mixture of documentary and fiction parallels the hybrid visual
form of the almost-frozen tableaux, thereby redoubling The Casting’s status as
a “between-image.” The use of near-still tableaux within moving images alleChapter
4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 151
gorizes memory’s fragile nature, refusing the determinative stasis of photography
in favor of an unsettling formal strategy that evokes an eerie pastness while
remaining fluid, open to contingency, and marked by the present tense of unfurling
movement. Though the figures stay frozen, clothing billows in the wind
on the desert road and the flicker of a television is reflected on the faces of the
family in the German home at Christmastime. The work thrives on this intermedial
tension, using it as an anti-realist device to temper the potential impression
of reality that might otherwise arise from the spectacle of the frontal projections.
Spectacular representation has been described as a kind of freezing that halts
narrative, something that here, as in the cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is
literalized, exaggerated, and used against itself.
But in addition to serving this
critical function, the tension between stillness and movement in The Casting’s
tableaux projections points to the desire to situate the installation in an in-between
space characterized by a contamination of boundaries and a lack of fit in
established paradigms.
This contamination takes place not just between media and between regimes
of representation but also between the institutions of cinema and art: even
though it leaves behind the references to film history found in Spielberg’s List,
cinema remains a central component and concern of The Casting. Instead of
engaging in an importation of celluloid (as in the work discussed in chapter
two) or existing cinematic texts (as in the work discussed in chapter three), The
Casting engages in an importation of cinematic techniques and forms. It makes
use of an element of the production of a film, the casting session, as a fictional
conceit that will provide a way in to examining the relationship between memory,
narration, and spectacle – a triangulation in which the cinema has historically
participated in a powerful manner. Though the dispositif of The Casting –
with its quadruple projection, mobile viewer, and art institutional context – differs
greatly from that of classical cinema, one can say that it nonetheless makes
use of cinematographic vocabularies and techniques such as projection, the
shot/reverse shot, and mise-en-scène. The scale of its projected images aligns it
with the giganticism and forgetting of material support that are central attributes
of the cinematic apparatus, while the frontal projections espouse a highgloss
aesthetic evocative of commercial cinema. In addition to these formal
characteristics, The Casting foregrounds and interrogates two of cinema’s key
abilities: fictional storytelling and documentary testimony. Both of these abilities
rest on a conception of cinema as a technology of the virtual, something
that has historically been problematized in artists’ employments of the moving
image but that has been key to the history of cinema. The Casting is one of a
whole host of moving image works produced since  that interrogate a tension
central to the cinema: the tension between referentiality and representation,
between a fidelity to the world and a fictionalization of it.
152 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
But what exactly is the status of documentary in The Casting? Through extensive
editing, the soldier’s words are emptied of any attestation to the real.
Fast asserts the all-pervasiveness of fabulation, suggesting that so-called nonfiction
imagery is functionally equivalent to fiction due to the ways in which it
is processed through highly conventional structures of representation. Though
the frontal projections seem to be generated by these words – they seem to be a
kind of parasitical discourse that feeds off of the documentary testimony, visualizing
the images it evokes – the editing of the interview suggests that in fact
the opposite is true: the shaping of the soldier’s discourse is determined by the
exigencies of spectacular representation. Whatever the soldier actually said has
been thoroughly transformed by its submission to codified representational
practices. In this respect, The Casting mimics the modes of representation that
govern mainstream news media and “based on a true story” war movies, as
reports from Iraq are redacted and repackaged to be maximally mediagenic.
The installation unveils the workings of these prevalent practices and subjects
them to a critical gaze, but does nothing to contest them or offer alternatives.
In her article “Omer Fast: When Images Lie... About the Fictionality of Documents,”
Maria Muhle writes that, “Fast undermines the relationship between
the fictional and the factual, and reveals the equally artificial nature of both.”
Of course, the factual image is as constructed as the fictional image, but is it
“equally artificial”? There is a real danger in negating the referential power of
the documentary image and placing it on the same plane as fiction. Their relationship
to actuality is simply not the same. What responsibility to his interview
subject does Fast abandon when he carves up the man’s words for art world
consumption? In Spielberg’s List, the artist used an existing film as a launching
pad for an exploration of the fictionalization of reality and presented the
confusion of history and the historical film as unsettling and dangerous. In The
Casting, however, this indiscernibility of fiction and reality is staged by the
work itself. While the objective may be to draw attention to the ways in which
this equivalence works in television and cinema, The Casting reproduces it in
the process. One might say that The Casting makes use of documentary
images in order to assert a lack of belief in the possibility of documentary. It is
based on a non-fiction interview, but sets to work on doubly fictionalizing it
through extensive editing (on the rear projections) and cinematic visualizations
(on the front projections). Far from asserting the ability to testify to an event that
telescopes personal and historical experience, it suggests that in fact all such
narratives are processed through highly conventionalized representational
structures that distort and transform them. Reality has receded behind media
images, as fiction and fact occupy the same plane of representation.
This position finds a theoretical buttress in Jean Baudrillard’s account of the
rise of the age of simulation, in which a hyperreality of simulacra governs visual
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 153
culture. The simulacrum is a copy without origin, without anchorage in reality.
Images refer not to the real, but to each other, linking together along a differential
chain of signs. The fading of the real is a process intimately linked to technology
and in particular to technologies of image reproduction such as the cinema,
which offer powerful reality effects in the absence of reality itself: “[T]he
age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials – worse: by
their artificial resurrection in systems of signs...”
A lived relation to reality is
replaced by the hyperreality of media images. The real disappears not out of
rarity, but out of surfeit: as it is produced and overproduced by the media,
every real event is preceded by its fictional precursor. Reality becomes a mere
byproduct of representational codes. In a chapter called “The Murder of the
Real,” Baudrillard states his point in a characteristically totalizing and declarative
manner: “In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of
the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed.”
Since the early s, Baudrillard’s work has been especially embraced by
artists and curators, perhaps more so than that of many other French poststructuralist
theorists whose writings also entered art critical discourse at this time.
As The Casting demonstrates, this interest continues even as forms of artistic
practice have changed. In a manner consonant with Johan Grimonprez’s Double
Take (), another documentary-fiction hybrid, The Casting questions
the referential claims of the documentary image, melding it with fiction to suggest
that our contemporary moment is marked by a recession of the real beneath
a veil of fiction. While The Casting serves to direct attention to the ways
in which such events are spectacularized for media consumption and to undercut
any unqualified claims of documentary truth, its wholehearted participation
in a rhetoric that claims the image has been stripped of its relation to the real is
worth questioning.
Other artists, meanwhile, have explored the interaction of reality and fiction
in a less cynical manner that retains an investment in the referential status of the
image. They turn to hybrid formations of documentary and fiction not to assert
their interchangeability, but in order to explore the multiplicity of relations that
mediate between the real and the image. They reject documentary transparency,
but so too do they contest the logic of simulation by insisting on the moving
image as manifesting a trace of the real precisely at a time when the referential
power of images finds itself in question. The proliferation of digital media has
resulted in a much greater ability to produce and disseminate non-fiction
images, but in the process it has provoked a crisis in the faith spectators invest
in these images as “authentic.” Rather than see this condition as doing away
with any possibility of documentary practice, artists such as Kutluğ Ataman,
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Amar Kanwar have underlined the coexistence of referentiality
and representation in order to both problematize documentary’s truth
154 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
claims and underline the truth that can be produced through fiction. Where
Baudrillard engages in a postmodern revival of Platonism that sees the image
as a mere semblance, these artists assert that, more than just functioning as a
vessel of empty spectacle supplying spurious reality-effects, the moving image,
with its anchorage in actuality, can be used to inform, to move, and to imagine
change. It can provide a way to encounter alterity, to rethink received narratives,
and to see the world anew.
This desire to interrogate the relationship between reality and fiction is palpable
in moving image art since . The double turn to documentary and fiction
at this time marks an embrace of the moving image as a technology of the
virtual, a quality of film and video that had been extensively problematized in
earlier artists’ employments of the moving image and film theoretical writing
contemporaneous with them. Responding to Anthony McCall in a roundtable
on the projected image in contemporary art, Hal Foster remarked that, in the
contemporary moment, “There’s a rampant pictorialism, which is also a rampant
virtualism, that the sculptural and spatial interests of your generation, Anthony,
wanted to challenge, or at least to probe.”
Pictorialism, virtualism, and,
one must add, narrative were perceived as the means by which cinema
achieved spectatorial absorption – and were thus aligned with illusion and mystification.
The shift from material actuality to virtuality that Foster points out is
an important factor in conceptualizing how artists’ uses of the moving image
since  demonstrate an increased affinity with cinema when compared to
their precursors, individuals who often aligned their uses of film and video
with media such as sculpture and/or performance and against the mass cultural
institution of cinema. It is easy to see how uses of mm or the remaking of the
products of film history invoke the realm of cinema. Less obvious but no less
important to the increased presence of cinema in the art of the past two decades
is the manner in which artists have embraced the possibilities of virtuality and
narrativity that exist within the moving image.
The preceding two chapters of this book have examined strains of artistic
practice that locate cinematic specificity both within and beyond the material
basis of the apparatus. Chapter two asserted that analogue film is linked to the
spectral reanimation of contingent traces of pastness, while chapter three emphasized
the public dimension of the institution and its status as a repository of
shared cultural memory. In both cases, one finds propositions as to what cinema
might be that investigate how the apparatus functions historically and socially.
Following this objective to locate cinematic specificity as encompassing and also
exceeding its supporting technology, this chapter will offer one final proposition
concerning how cinema is “exhibited” or held up for examination in contemporary
art: it will investigate the ways in which artists have latched on to cinema’s
ability to both fictionalize and document the world – in short, to offer spectators
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 155
a revelatory, virtual encounter with another place and time. The transformative
mechanisms that intervene between the real and its representation may come
under attack, as they do in The Casting, or, as the following pages will demonstrate,
they may be mined for their potential to generate an ethical encounter
with the documentary archive, as they are in Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First
Pages (-). Whatever the stance taken, the works under examination in
this chapter investigate the modes of fiction and documentary as always already
coexisting in the moving image and as constituting a vast measure of its
power.
Rather than see fiction and non-fiction as opposed or separate, these works
redouble the “aesthetics of confusion” that Bellour has deemed central to the
othered cinema with the additional confusion of the division between fabulation
and reference. They assert a space of overlap that maintains that, just as
“every film is a fiction film,” so too is “every film a documentary.” As T.J. Demos
has written, there has been a “significant convergence in the art of the moving
image over the last decade, one that is remarkable for advancing political
investment by means of subtle aesthetic construction, doing so by joining documentary
and fictional modes into [an] uncertain relationship.”
These works
demonstrate that the museum and gallery now serve as sites at which to think
beyond simulation and reimagine the tension and overlap between fiction and
documentary – a tension to which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, “[f]rom
the beginning, film has owed an important part of its fascination.”
While they may not evince the material relationship to cinema found in the
celluloid works of Tacita Dean or Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, nor the citational
relationship to cinema found in the practices of Candice Breitz or Douglas
Gordon, the works explored in this chapter are nonetheless evidence of the
ways in which moving image art since  has both interrogated and participated
in the institution of cinema as it enters its second century. Unlike the practices
discussed in the last two chapters, which focused on cinema as a superannuated
medium to be commemorated and/or interrogated within the space
of the gallery, these diverse practices constitute a site at which cinema is embraced
at least in part for its novelty. They leave behind cinephilia and nostalgia
to instead see cinema as offering new artistic possibilities and new opportunities
to engage the social and political. As such, they constitute a site of novelty
that is irreducible to a technophilic spectacularization of contemporary art, a
novelty that is not the ever-same in the guise of the ever-new that is the hallmark
of the commodity form. Rather, they invoke the novelty of the blind spot,
as they renegotiate formerly distinct categories and muddle boundaries.
156 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Anti-anti-illusionism
The interest in documentary and fiction in moving image art since  indicates
a waning of the phobic relationship to cinematic illusionism that had
marked many earlier artists’ uses of film and video. Fictional practices have
emerged that explore the new possibilities for storytelling afforded by the multiple
projection environments of the gallery space, while a whole host of critical
and curatorial projects have explored what has been called the “documentary
turn” of contemporary art.
In short, one confronts a diverse embrace of the
technical and aesthetic possibilities of cinema while leaving behind specific reference
to film history. For Dominique Païni, such practices displace the emphasis
on remaking to constitute the next stage in a generational progression of
moving image art – even though one must assert that both tendencies appear
contemporaneously in the early s and that such talk of “generations” frequently
overlooks asynchronous developments in favor of a tidier narrative of
quasi-Oedipal struggle. Païni sees “recyclers” like Pierre Huyghe and Douglas
Gordon as comprising a third generation of video artists that is superseded by a
fourth generation interested in exploring the spatialization of narrative and that
“makes use of the moving image to exhibit a new material: time.”
In this account,
what is at stake in the work of such artists “is less an iconographic borrowing
from the cinema than the structural importation of cinema into the
space of the museum,” allowing cinematic temporality and storytelling to be
explored outside of the restrictions imposed by the movie theater.
Païni exhibits
a discernible preference for the artists of this fourth generation, looking to
them to provide the title of his book, Le temps exposé (Time Exhibited), and content
that they cease what he perceives to be desublimating assaults against classical
cinema perpetrated by artists such as Gordon.
Though Païni names Doug Aitken, Pipilotti Rist, and Sam Taylor-Wood as
the key representatives of the tendency he describes, one might also add to the
list figures such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Kutluğ Ataman, Matthew Barney, Stan
Douglas (also something of a “recycler”), Omer Fast, Dominique GonzalezFoerster,
Amar Kanwar, Isaac Julien,
Steve McQueen, Fiona Tan, and countless
others. It perhaps goes without saying that this (far from exhaustive) inventory
brings together a great diversity of practices by no means reducible to a
single set of concerns. However, what all these artists share is a use of projection
in tandem with a valorization of the moving image as a technology of the virtual
over its sculptural or material attributes. The primary emphasis is on a represented
scene or event rather than on the apparatus itself, whether this scene
consists of a fictional scenario or a documentary portrait. Narrative, however
fragmentary or nonlinear, becomes important. This is not to suggest that the
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 157
actuality of the apparatus ceases to be a concern for these artists; indeed, they
are sharply attuned to the material specificities of the media in which they
work. They do not, however, turn inwards to construct a recursive spiral of
reflexivity but rather use the moving image to turn outwards and open artistic
production to an encounter with subjective and/or historical experience. In The
Casting, for example, the sculptural configuration of the quadruple projection
is key to the work, but it is key as a means rather than an end in itself. The
reflexivity exhibited here has less to do with the material attributes of the apparatus
and altogether more to do with a desire to probe cinema’s double relationship
to representation and referentiality – two qualities that come together in its
conception as a technology of the virtual.
Though the notion of virtuality is often invoked in reference to new media (as
in “virtual reality”), Anne Friedberg has noted that it is necessary to challenge
such restrictive accounts. Rather, as Friedberg suggests, “The virtual is a substitute
– ‘acting without agency or matter’ – an immaterial proxy for the ma-
terial.”
Together, fiction and documentary designate two ways in which cinema
is a technology of the virtual; that is, they are terms that describe the
relationship between “material” reality and its “immaterial proxy,” the image.
Despite their ontological differences, they both make visible another space and
time before the spectator. To assert that cinema is a technology of the virtual is
not to suggest a transparency between the image and the material reality it represents;
as Friedberg writes, it is not a matter of original and copy “because the
virtuality of the image does not imply direct mimesis, but a transfer – more like
metaphor – from one plane of meaning and appearance to another.”
Rather,
the invocation of the category in relation to contemporary artists’ employments
of the moving image is a way of marking out a difference in the conceptualization
of the apparatus relative to that of the s and s, a time when many
artists and filmmakers refused a notion of the moving image as immaterial
proxy and instead insisted on it as a material surface.
Hybrid Forms
The modes of documentary and fiction might seem antithetical to one another.
One suggests a fidelity to the real, while the other signals a departure from it
into the realm of fabulation. As Bill Nichols has put it, in fiction film, it is “a
likeness rather than a replica to which we attend,” whereas with documentary
“we are offered access to the world” rather than “a world.”
Both, however, are
always integral to the moving image, whether one is speaking of a featurelength
narrative or a documentary short relatively devoid of cause-and-effect
158 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
logic. The authors of Aesthetics of Film write that every film – even the documentary
– is a fiction film because of “the law requiring that every film, by its materials
of expression (moving images and sounds), ‘unrealizes’ what it represents,
transforming it into a spectacle.”
In other words, what the spectator sees is not
the thing in itself but its virtual double. The real event is fictionalized as it is
channeled through structures of representation. All films are fictional in this
sense, while the fiction film is doubly so: “it is unreal because it represents the
fiction and because of the way in which it represents the fiction (using images of
objects and of actors).”
At the same time, though, every film is a documentary film. Even if it “‘unrealizes’
what it represents,” it is nonetheless first and foremost a photographic
record of its referent, a revelatory trace of a particular space and time. It may
not transparently reflect this reality, subjecting it to various kinds of transformations
through the work of representation, but it nonetheless does maintain a
relation to it. Excluding the cases of animation and computer-generated imagery
(about which more later), the cinematic image is a document of a profilmic
event. Very different than the “impression of reality” created by the classical
Hollywood cinema or the specious dramatizations of so-called reality television,
this understanding of the relationship between the filmic image and the
real asserts, in short, that due to the recording function of cinema, the referent
adheres.
The tension between documentary and fiction is thus in play in almost all
encounters with the moving image and is intimately bound up in the pleasures
it provides and the knowledge it promises. Most often, this interplay is minimized
as a given work will firmly inhabit one camp and disavow its relation to
the other. In other words, a fiction film will attempt to minimize the force of the
profilmic so as to strengthen the impression of reality of its diegetic world,
while a documentary film will bracket the necessary unrealization of the filmic
image and the factors that intervene between the real and its representation in
order to better communicate a sense of immediacy and veracity. In certain instances,
however, the coexistence of documentary and fiction is taken up as a
specific point of interrogation and the tension between them is cultivated rather
than subdued. In foregrounding a combination of the two within the textual
fabric of a single work, it becomes possible to destabilize an easy opposition
between truth and falsity and, in its place, to introduce a complex interaction
between them that is shifting and uncertain. Given the dangers of falling back
into an unreconstructed belief in documentary or of resuscitating the stillpowerful
ideological function of fiction, this is a particularly attractive option
for contemporary artists who seek to interrogate these modes without inheriting
the problems that they have historically posed. Moreover, it provides a way of
reflecting on the cinema itself, caught between traditions of recording traces of
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 159
the physical world and creating grand spectacle. The hybridization of fiction
and documentary dramatizes this essential friction and, in so doing, provides
these artists with a way of interrogating the status of the image.
Documentary is always already present beneath the fiction, lending it a relation
to the archivization of the past not present in theater or literature; at times,
the testimonial value of this documentary witnessing can erupt, exceed the fabulation
that seeks to contain it, and fracture the veneer of fiction so as to render
problematic its ontological status.
Meanwhile, one can highlight the manner
in which documentary is always subject to layers of mediation that work to unrealize
the profilmic event and channel it through the codes of cinematic representation
– something very much at play in The Casting. There can be no access
to the real in itself; to cite Jacques Rancière, “The real must be fictionalized
in order to be thought.”
By blending documentary and fiction, these ever-present
issues can be explicitly foregrounded and interrogated. Many films
throughout the history of cinema have done precisely this through varied strategies:
Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres fous (), Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up
(Nema-ye Nazdik, ), Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (), Gillo Pontecorvo’s
Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri, ), and Orson Welles’ F for
Fake () are only a few of the most prominent examples. These diverse films
strike at the very heart of cinematic fascination in their interrogations into spectatorial
belief and the referential and epistemological status of the image. In
their exploration of such hybrid documentary/fiction formations, the artists discussed
throughout this chapter continue this investigation while displacing its
sphere of inquiry from the movie theater to the art gallery.
Rehabilitating Narrative
Much of Kutluğ Ataman’s work relies on the interview – an intersubjective, narrative
situation – as a basic unit of composition. For Women Who Wear Wigs
(), the artist interviewed four Turkish women who all wear wigs for different
reasons: an activist gone underground, a cancer survivor, a Muslim university
student not allowed to wear a veil to school, and a transsexual prostitute
and activist whose head was shaved by the police. The four interviews are exhibited
as four projections placed side by side to form a polyphonic panorama.
The installation asserts that the wig is not simply a surface level adornment that
covers over the women’s essential selves, but rather an important element in
their conception of self and their relation to others. Though this foregrounding
of the multivalent meanings of appearance, disguise, and performance, as well
as the potential for producing truth that resides therein, Women Who Wear
160 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Wigs troubles any notion of objectivity or transparency that the interview mode
it espouses might invoke. This is no simple politics of the signified that would
use the medium of video as a mere container for content. Rather, instead of unmediated
testimony, one becomes aware of how fabulation and mythology are
always already present in the recounting of personal experience; Women Who
Wear Wigs actively interrogates the signifying mechanisms that work to constitute
identity. Here, as in many other works by Ataman – such as The  Seasons
of Veronica Read (), Twelve (), and Küba () – there is an insistence
on the moving image as a document of lived experience paired with a
keen attention to how formal mechanisms serve to shape the viewer’s experience
of such content. Ataman, who began as a filmmaker, works out of a documentary
tradition that has roots in the history of cinema rather than the history
of art. Through the exploration of multichannel installations and experiments
with the temporality of reception that would be impossible in a standard theatrical
exhibition, he recontextualizes that tradition in a dynamic way that introduces
new aesthetic and epistemological possibilities.
Kutluğ Ataman, Women Who Wear Wigs ().
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 161
Paul Willemen has pinpointed history and “the social anchorage of meaning
production” as two blind spots of vanguard media practices in the s and
s.
Questions of materiality, process, and subject formation tended to
supersede an interest in historical specificity or experience, something absolutely
evident if one examines the early years of video art as well. As Okwui
Enwezor – a figure who, as artistic director of Documenta  (), was a major
proponent of the “documentary turn” of contemporary art – has noted,
Greenbergian modernism “purges the external world from the space of art,
wishing for it a state of purity, a state which rejects not only illusionism, but
also asserts that the full meaning of any art is to be found in its specific me-
dium.”
Though film and video mounted significant challenges to modernism
as conceptualized by Greenberg, many artists’ uses of these media in the s
and s continued this purgation and remained introverted. As the modernist
paradigm waned and questions of history and the social did enter back into
video production, it was often at the expense of necessary interrogation into
signifying practices. Questions of form were left behind, implicitly suggesting
that truth was simply out there, waiting to be captured by a camera. Willemen
finds a third way in British avant-garde film production in the s, in which
narrative becomes an issue again, rather than simply a bad object to be disarticulated
or eliminated. Narrative, as the process through which the articulation of subject and
history is elaborated in the text as well as in relation to the text, is thus unavoidable if
one point of the discourse is precisely to trace the existence of the political within
particular histories.

Moving beyond the Adornian position that advanced art in a capitalist society
must be governed by a relentless negativity, this return to narrative means a
reengagement with the specificity of subjective and historical experience,
whether through fiction or documentary. It does not, however, advocate abandoning
of a politics of signification altogether, but rather aims at integrating an
interest in the processes of making meaning with a concern for history and social
existence.
Such a rehabilitation of narrative – be it fictional, documentary, or a hybrid
combination of the two – occurs with force in the artistic production of the s
and is exemplified by Women Who Wear Wigs. This rehabilitation of narrative
is not a simple embrace of fictions that would induce spectatorial pacification
nor a return to a prelapsarian belief in the truth of the documentary image.
Rather, Willemen paraphrases Walter Benjamin on historiography to write that,
“It is no longer the narrative that tells ‘the sequence of events like the beads of a
rosary,’ nor the deconstruction of such a procedure, but a narrative that ‘brushes
history against the grain.’”
It acknowledges that cinema must be understood
historically and also that history must be understood cinematically. In Women
162 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Who Wear Wigs, Ataman examines a complex and located nexus of gender,
subjective experience, collectivity, and politics. The linearity of a narrative that
would join events together in a tight causal chain “like the beads of a rosary” is
refused, as the viewer must instead work to forge connections across the four
projections of the work. Each reception of this narrative will be different depending
on when in the loop the viewer enters the room, what decisions he or
she makes while there, and when he or she decides to leave. No single voice is
privileged, but instead the four work in tandem so that, in the words of Emre
Baykal, “the work completes itself into a full and wider picture: a fifth frame
that amplifies a polyphonic sound of a wider reality, which is related to the
identity problem of the country, rather than to the problems associated with
certain identity politics.”
The flexible deployment of interlocking narratives is
a central element of this undertaking, as they telescope personal experience and
public history in variable ways depending on the spectator’s trajectory through
the space.
In , Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema advocated for pioneering new
moving image environments beyond the movie theater, but specified storytelling
as a specific point of derision:
Plot, story, and what commonly is known as “drama” are the devices that enable the
commercial entertainer to manipulate his audience. The very act of this manipulation,
gratifying conditioned needs, is what the films actually are about... The viewer of
commercial entertainment cinema does not want to work; he wants to be an object, to
be acted upon, to be manipulated. The true subject of commercial entertainment is
this little game it plays with its audience.
According to such logic, narrative, in large part due to the structures of identification
on which it relies, elicits passive audiences content in their pacification.
Rather than advocating for experimentation with and/or a subversion of narrative,
Youngblood rejects it entirely – and his position is far from exceptional.
Despite the dismantling and reconstruction of narrative forms that mark the
cinemas of the s and s across the globe, uses of the moving image in
art – even those by no means aligned with Expanded Cinema – largely stayed
away from narrative, seeing it as an agent of mystification, ideological naturalization,
and of the sublation of contradiction.
At the risk of overgeneralization, one might venture that a curious reversal
has taken place: in the s and s, narrative was to be rejected in favor of
an anti-illusionist experience of space and medium, but since the s, narrative
has been explored as a fragmentary and open terrain of socio-political inquiry,
while certain non-narrative explorations of spectacular intensity in the
vein of Youngblood’s book, such as Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (
Cubic Meters) (), have engaged in a replication of the forms of subjectivaChapter
4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 163
tion and image circulation that are endemic to advanced capitalism. This reversal
is a result of certain impasses reached in earlier forms of politically invested
media production and of the emergence in the intervening years of postmodernism
as a cultural logic marked by a spatial diagram and the disintegration
of the syntagmatic chain. Narrative shifts from being seen as complicit with
ideological hegemony (as it was in the s) to something that in fact has the
possibility of departing from the dominant cultural logic of disconnected signifiers.
There are, of course, instances in which narrative and spectacle jostle fiercely
with each other: the work of Matthew Barney and Doug Aitken, for example,
makes use of a narrative as something of a skeleton to cloak in spectacular
robes, much as would a post-classical Hollywood blockbuster such as James
Cameron’s Avatar (). However, narrative may also be marshaled as a way
of intervening in economies of signification and reimagining the relationships
between subjectivity, memory, and history. Through its organization of time
and event, it can counter the prevailing logic of fragmentation and piece back
together syntagmatic units in new ways. Like cinema itself, it has ceased to be a
bad object in artists’ employments of the moving image, emerging as one strategy
used to stage important investigations into historical change and subjective
experience.
This rehabilitation of narrative is also present in Laura Mulvey’s “Changes:
Thoughts on Myth, Narrative, and Historical Experience,” a  essay in
which the author returns to the problematic of cinematic representations of sexual
difference she outlined in ’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In
“Changes,” Mulvey suggests narrative as a possible way out of the ahistorical
structural oppositions (such as woman : man :: spectacle : narrative) that had
governed much of feminist theory in the s, be it film-related or otherwise.
Mulvey admits in “Changes” that the conceptual framework she employed in
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – the frozen time of structuralist synchronic
analysis – might have in fact enacted a blockage that would prohibit a
consideration of her ideas in relation to temporal change, in relation to history.
Instead, she turns to narrative as a locus of transformation that may leave resolution
and closure in suspension, never fully dissipating the possibilities it
opens.
If narrative resolution often works recuperatively, absorbing back into normality
the disruptive element that initiated the story, Mulvey’s interest is in mobilizing
narratives that resist such recuperation and instead investing in the liminality
of the middle of the story, that interstitial stage in which real change
occurs. As with Willemen, this involves a departure from a form of narrative
that would relate “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.” She encourages
the reader to remember that structures of sexual differentiation and
identity formation such as the Oedipus complex function as “temporal forms,
164 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
narrative forms,” and asserts, “If narrative, with the help of avant-garde principles,
can be conceived around ending that is not closure, and the state of liminality
as politically significant, it can question the symbolic and allow myth and
symbols to be constantly revalued.”
The gallery space, with its rejection of
start-to-finish viewing and possibility for multiscreen environments, seems
especially poised to pioneer the creation of these new narrative forms that
might integrate experimental strategies and problematize closure.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, If  Was  ().
The notion of a state of liminality as politically significant is central to Eija-Liisa
Ahtila’s If  Was  (). If  Was  is a triple-projection installation that engages
a topic dear to the history of video art: subject formation. However, its
predecessors lie less in that tradition than in the fragmentary and multifaceted
narratives of s European art cinema, owing much to its loosening of the
causal chain and indiscernibility of past, present, reality, and fantasy. The tenminute
loop reimagines gendered subject formation outside of a psychoanalytic
paradigm of lack, instead insisting on the productivity of becoming. Though the
work is based in documentary interviews, Ahtila uses fictional strategies to create
a quasi-utopian space of possibility in which gender relations and attitudes
towards sexuality find radically altered expression, something that suggested in
the topsy-turviness invoked by the installation’s title, drawn from a Jimi
Hendrix lyric: “Got my own world to live through/And I ain’t gonna copy you/
If six turned out to be nine/Oh I don’t mind.” A group of teenage girls candidly
discuss their views on gender, sexuality, and sexual experience, crisscrossing the
public and private realms to engage the world of MTV and magazines alongside
intimate recollections shared between friends. The girls move between
three modes of discourse – memories, fantasies, and perceptions – that are at
times indiscernible from one another. An alternating use of voice-over and synchronized
sound troubles any easy knowledge as to whether the speaker is addressing
someone else within the diegesis or presenting a monologue accessible
only to the spectator.
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 165
As noted above, If  Was  is a work of fiction, but was informed by interviews
with young girls Ahtila conducted in Helsinki. The influence of documentary
in the work is felt in its formal vocabulary, which makes frequent use
of direct address and the device of the interview. The installation sets up a series
of contaminations of normally upheld boundaries – self/other, fiction/non-fiction,
public/private – that carry over into what is perhaps the central conceit of
the work: its temporal regime. A girl of approximately fifteen delivers an anecdote
in the past tense about her sexual activity in high school and how the other
girls treated her because of it. She says, “Flat-breasted bookworms wondered if
I had too big a mouth and fake eyelashes. Tough girls called me a whore and
sapling feminists thought I was just stupid.” This summons a schism within the
audio-visual representation, as it occupies two temporal locations at once. A
teenage girl speaks the words of a woman much older; perhaps they belong to
another and perhaps they belong to her future self, but in either case they are
reflecting back from a time to come on the present tense of the image, young
adulthood. In the following scene, Ahtila moves towards a more blatant proclamation
of such anachronism: a young girl sits on the railing outside her school
and proclaims, “Here I sit with my legs apart like a little girl who hasn’t learned
anything about sex, who has no idea that a woman must hide her private parts
and lust. In fact, I’m thirty-eight years old.”
The anachronism of If  Was  effects a dislocation, as the girls sometimes
speak what the viewer presumes to be their “own” words – intensely personal
words, at that – and other times parrot the words of women who are their
senior. In either case, these words are not their own, but those of documentary
subjects interviewed by Ahtila. This ventriloquism allows for a loosening of the
connection between the speaker and what is spoken to allow for fantasy and
memory to circulate through the work in a depersonalized and temporally fluid
manner. Ahtila has said, “Instead of just getting characters to talk about feminist
issues, I wanted to incorporate feminism deeper into the structure of the
work.”
If  Was  both recalls and points to the limitations of the feminist
consciousness-raising documentary by introducing a series of refractions that
makes evident the impossibility of a stable subject who would utter “I” or who
would communicate authentic experience. The work remains grounded in a discussion
of the experiences of women and girls, but these stories are mediated
through fictional conceits that allow them to reflexively confront the conditions
of their enunciation and the non-transparency of both language and the filmic
image.
In her analysis of the installation, Alison Butler has suggested that
The installation’s form, through its spatial and temporal articulation, embodies a micropolitics
of becoming, even as its content – its insistent concern with women’s experience
– defines this field of micropolitics in terms of molar identity. From a femin-
166 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
ist perspective, If  was  is especially interesting because it explores a feminist politics
of temporality.
One thus finds an alliance between a feminist politics grounded in the specificity
of women’s experience and a “micropolitics” that refuses such identitarian
logic. It is by maintaining these two approaches in play at once that Ahtila overcomes
a problem that has plagued feminism: how to rally around the signifier
“women” while also engaging in a critique of the logic of identity that has subtended
the regime of phallogocentrism. The looped format and the refusal of a
developmental logic move away from any possibility of narrative closure,
something that film history has shown rarely ends well for women. Instead, If
 Was  remains open, inhabiting a space of liminality.
In its looped, multiscreen format and accompanying temporal dislocations,
the work insists on the powers of fragmentation, recombination, and becoming.
The figures of If  Was  are not girls and not women, as they are placed in an
interstitial position that allows them to shift age brackets, knowledges, and discursive
registers. Girlhood ceaselessly oscillates between being championed as a
site of potentiality and freedom and being retrospectively viewed from the future
of womanhood as a painful training ground for what will follow. One voice
asserts, “One thing is certain for us all, the players in this game: we have a
future,” only to have another respond, “But I’ve been there already: educate
yourself.” There is an interplay here between determination and room to maneuver,
inevitability and unforeseeability, that refuses to allow the possibilities of
girlhood to be entirely recuperated into a traditional developmental narrative.
Ahtila has remarked, “The idea of linearity bothers me, as does the notion of
causality that accompanies it and the assumption that a story should become
understandable only through that formula.”
Linearity and causality are refused
in If  Was  both in its account of gender formation and in its narrative
and formal structure. In this way, Ahtila rehabilitates fictional narrative as a
possibility for political engagement and draws out the new possibilities for cinematic
storytelling that are made possible by multiscreen projection.
A Return of the Real
The revival of fictional narrative may thus be seen as both a response to the
omissions and impasses of an earlier generation fixed on anti-illusionism and
self-reflexivity and as a by-product of a change in the dominant cultural logic
that enacts a shift in the available possibilities for opposition. The recent embrace
of documentary also draws on such developments. It may be seen as a
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 167
desire to reinject questions of history and the social into aesthetic production as
well as a reaction to often hyperbolic proclamations of the fading of the real and
a concomitant proliferation of simulacra. As noted with regard to The Casting,
certain artists continue to affirm the rule of simulation even as they expose it to
critique. But others – and here one might invoke Ataman’s commitment to the
interview and contrast it to the way Fast uses the interview in The Casting –
reassert the referentiality of the moving image precisely as an intervention into
a visual culture that all too often treats documents like entertainment.
In The Return of the Real, Hal Foster diagnoses the fascination with trauma
and abjection in the art of the s as in part symptomatic of “a dissatisfaction
with the textualist model of culture as well as the conventionalist view of reality
– as if the real, repressed in poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as
traumatic.”
Just as poststructuralism’s emphasis on signification as a process
grounded in a differential system of signs rather than any referent in the external
world led artists to return to the fleshy obstinacy of the body, so too one
might suggest that the surge in documentary practices is another such “return
of the real” after its long-time bracketing. The return to the real of documentary
comes at a time when technological advances in image production have displaced
the acheiropoietic images of film and video with images in which the
human hand (via computer) once again intervenes. Commercial cinema increasingly
relies on compositing and computer-generated imagery in a manner that
substantially alters its ontology and weakens its link to the real. Lev Manovich
has suggested that this precipitates a condition in which “cinema can no longer
be clearly distinguished from animation.”
Though animation has long been
considered to be one particular case of cinema, Manovich asserts that the proliferation
of digital imagery in contemporary cinema reverses this notion to make
cinema “one particular case of animation.”
In such a climate, declarations such as “the Gulf War did not take place” have
dialectically reversed into a renewed interest in referentiality.
Baudrillard predicted
this reaction already in ’s Simulations: “When the real is no longer
what it used to be...[t]here is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience, a
resurrection of the figurative where object and substance have disappeared.
And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential...”
Of
course, a cynical view of this interest in the referential would see it simply as a
nostalgic pastiche of history and a false production of the real that remains fully
within the realm of the simulacrum, perhaps of the American Graffiti ()
variety or even that of the nightly news. Or to follow a diverging but equally
cynical path, the so-called documentary turn, with its ability to render the distant
proximate and offer the urgent charge of actuality, might be simply understood
as fully complicit in the art world’s opportunistic forays into the exoticism
of otherness, providing a thoroughly demarcated and reified zone of “realness”
168 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
for ready consumption.
However, the recent turn to documentary in contemporary
art practice also attests to the possibility of refusing the logic of the simulacrum
and reveals the extent to which proclaiming the recession of the real
serves to perpetuate the very forgetting of history it seeks to describe. The political
imperative was once to dismantle the simulation machine and refuse the
illusionism of cinema, but now it is to embrace that very same machine’s powers
of registration as they are increasingly displaced by manufactured images that
have little to no anchorage in physical reality.
Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages (-).
Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages both insists on the testimonial value of
the image while also engaging in strategies that “unrealize” the image and assert
a distance from the referent. Under the military junta in Burma, the State
Peace and Development Council requires that all publications include state objectives
and slogans on their first page. In December , Ko Thon Htay, a
bookseller, was arrested for removing these first pages in the printed matter he
sold. The Torn First Pages draws its title from this act of protest. The installation
consists of nineteen video projections on paper, so many torn first pages
now rid of government slogans and given over to serving as a material support
for a heterogeneous array of images that respond and testify to the struggle for
democracy. The projections, arranged in three structures, mobilize the traditions
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 169
of found footage, reportage, ethnography, and activists’ video in mobile constellations
of meaning that never resolve in a finite manner. The viewer is free to
move around these projections at will, here encountering a found-footage work
by Kanwar that makes jarring interventions into the audio-visual archive, there
coming across interviews with the Burmese diaspora in India, Norway, and the
United States, and still over there pausing to watch video footage smuggled out
of the country. Michael Renov has enumerated four modalities of documentary
poetics: preservation, persuasion, analysis, and expressivity.
Through its nineteen
projections, The Torn First Pages engages all four of these discursive
functions: it asserts the image as a trace of the historical real, it argues for the
cause of democracy in Burma, it produces knowledge of this struggle by interrogating
a selection of images stemming from it, and it does so with a formal
and aesthetic acuity that heightens the work’s affective resonance.
In order to reimagine the developmental narratives of gender, If  Was  fictionalized
a series of documentary findings. By contrast, Amar Kanwar’s The
Torn First Pages stays firmly grounded in the documentary mode. Throughout,
one finds a strong commitment to the testimonial powers of the image.
Where, then, lies its alliance with fiction? Rather than in the staging of scenarios
or in any recourse to a likeness of a world rather than a replica of the world, The
Torn First Pages evinces a relationship to fiction in its wholehearted embrace
of the manner in which the projected image is always fictional insofar as it “unrealizes”
the referent, even when it makes documentary claims. Recall the axiom
cited above: every film is a fiction film since “every film, by its materials of
expression (moving images and sounds), ‘unrealizes’ what it represents, transforming
it into a spectacle.” Certain strands of documentary filmmaking – notably
direct cinema and cinéma verité – have attempted to combat this necessary
unrealization by cultivating formal techniques that would aim to collapse image
and referent in the production of objective truth. This denial of mediation is,
however, eminently ideological, as it aims to dissimulate the processes of unrealization
that are always at work. Rather than work to deny such processes, Kanwar
acknowledges them, pries them open, and mines them for their potential
for intervention. He pulls the referential image farther away from the real in
order to return to the world a greater truth than would inhere in the image
alone.
The notion that there is a need to depart from the reproduction of physical
reality in order to produce knowledge of this reality has a long history in debates
around the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In a reaction to
the aesthetic writings of Georg Lukács entitled “Reconciliation Under Duress,”
Adorno writes,
The truth of the matter is that except where art goes against its own essence and
simply duplicates existence, its task vis-à-vis that which merely exists, is to be its
170 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
essence and image. This alone constitutes the aesthetic; art does not become knowledge
with reference to mere immediate reality, i.e. by doing justice to a reality which
veils its own essence and suppresses truth in favour of a merely classificatory order.
Art and reality can only converge if art crystallizes out its own formal laws, not by
passively accepting objects as they come.
Where Lukács had advocated for realism, Adorno asserts a divergence from the
world as necessary to avoid simply replicating the petrified surfaces of capitalism.
Unlike evidence, which is constituted as a category through its proximity
and fidelity to the world, art, for Adorno, essentially diverges from it. Art
would be “go[ing] against its own essence” if it were to simply duplicate the
physical world. If art were to replicate empirical appearances, it would merely
reproduce the reified surfaces that exist there, obfuscating any true knowledge
of the economic and social realities of the capitalist system that underlie its
superficial functioning. By producing a “negative knowledge of the actual
world,” art is able to remain committed only insofar as it diverges from empirical
reality.
And yet, despite its clear political commitment, Adorno’s position
risks turning a blind eye to the particularities of social and historical existence.
How might one synthesize an engagement with reality and an acknowledgement
that merely reproducing images of the world is insufficient? In The Torn
First Pages, one witnesses a careful negotiation of departing from and returning
to existence. Rather than simply reproducing existing images of the Burmese
struggle for democracy, Kanwar subjects them to dissection and cross-analysis
and situates them in relation to larger constellations of meaning. He sees
them as documents and as images that possess their own formal and material
specificity. Rather than assuming that the image might self-evidently hold forth,
Kanwar follows Georges Didi-Huberman’s proposition: “Images become precious
to historical knowledge the moment they are put into perspective, in montages
of intelligibility.”
Seeing may be believing, but it is not knowing. In order
for the production of knowledge to occur, it is necessary to create constellations
of meaning.
The Torn First Pages incorporates small, quasi-autonomous works that embrace
formal strategies that question the premises of visibility and the truth of
media images. One such video is The Face (), shot on  and  October
 when the then-commander of the military junta, Senior General Than
Shwe, visited Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial site in New Delhi.
The Face begins
with a shaky, handheld shot of Than Shwe being greeted with a garland of
flowers in a crowded room. After roughly twenty-three seconds, a hand covers
the lens and a small title appears at the bottom of the screen: “no cameras allowed.”
Once again, the obstacles to visibility are underlined. After several seconds
of blackness, one grainy image dissolves into another, a barely visible
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 171
close-up of Than Shwe. The work’s title and date of filming appear onscreen.
Grainy slow motion footage of a wreath of flowers gives way to an intertitle:
“The next morning/ Senior General Than Shwe/ Supreme Head of the Burmese
Military Dictatorship/visited/ the cremation memorial site of Mahatma Ghandi
in New Delhi to pay his respects.” The remainder of The Face is given over to
Kanwar’s manipulations of footage of this visit. In the absence of being able to
film the day before (“no cameras allowed”), the artist intervenes into the sanctioned
imagery in order to speak to the absurdity of the event: the leader of a
country that violently represses non-violent opposition is paying tribute to
Ghandi, the man who said, “I object to violence because when it appears to do
good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
Amar Kanwar, The Face (), from The Torn First Pages (-).
Two men carry the floral wreath in front of Than Shwe, who lays it on the memorial
site and poses for the cameras, the shutters of which are heard clicking on
the soundtrack along with Gandhi’s favorite hymn, “Vaishnava Janato.” Than
Shwe walks around the memorial as a voice from off-screen shouts, “Excuse
me, sir! Wait, wait, sir!” As the camera pans to follow Than Shwe, it reveals a
white barrier behind which the press stand. As cameras click, Than Shwe begins
to throw pink flower petals on the memorial, surrounded by functionaries. The
voice from off-screen coaxes, “One more, sir, one more!” As if following the
injunction of this onlooker, Kanwar isolates this throw and repeats it over and
172 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
over again faster and faster, causing the music on the soundtrack to turn into an
increasingly high-pitched, frenzied chirping. He zooms in on the basket of flower
petals and isolates the faces of a number of onlookers, ending on Than Shwe.
With the grating audio still on the soundtrack, Kanwar moves to an image of
the face of a young man on a poster, the kind carried by activists to recall individuals
who have been killed or imprisoned by the regime. Frames are blended
together so as to create a tension between stillness and movement. The soundtrack
goes silent and the face stays onscreen. The video ends with a dissolve to
black.
The Face foregrounds questions of media representation and suggests how
false a documentary image can be. Than Shwe presents a benign visage to the
world in a ceremony staged for news media, a complete fiction when considered
in relation to his government’s policies. The opening of the video, with its
abrupt disturbance of the image of Than Shwe receiving the flower garland,
explicitly stages the problem of the absence of images due to the rigid censorship
of the press in Burma since the  military coup. By the end of the video,
the official face of the military junta has been replaced by languid close-ups of a
Burmese citizen: from the face of power to the face of the oppressed. Kanwar’s
manipulations of the footage reveal the monstrosity and absurdity of the event,
reframing this document of a state visit as a document of falsity. The onlookers
at the ceremony turn into so many willing accomplices to this pretender, called
out in a series of close-ups that isolate their facial expressions during the flower
throwing. In their passive acceptance of this feint, they come to stand in for an
international community that has largely turned a blind eye to the human rights
abuses under the military junta.
The Face is one of six projections in part one of The Torn First Pages. It
occupies the upper left corner of the apparatus, positioned immediately above
two mirrored projections of Thet Win Aung (). This short video concentrates
on the face of its titular individual, a thirty-four-year-old man who died
in Mandalay Prison while serving a fifty-nine-year sentence for organizing student
protests. His photo is affixed to a placard in a solemn gesture of remembrance.
The Face is next to Ma Win Maw Oo (), an anatomization of a
photograph of the titular individual, a high school student shot and killed in
the  student protests. The video is comprised of a series of pulsating, blurry
close-ups of details of a photograph of her body being carried away by two
medical students. The entire image becomes visible just briefly at the end of the
video. The soundtrack of The Face jostles for attention with the sounds of a
brass band playing jazz on the projection on the extreme right, which documents
the experiences of Burmese exiles in Norway involved with the Democratic
Voice of Burma, a radio station that broadcasts via shortwave into the
country. The connections that arise between The Face and these surrounding
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 173
projections are of central importance. While one might well view The Face as
an independent work, it achieves its full resonance within the larger constellation
of the other projections. The face of the military dictatorship stands above
and next to the faces of individuals whose lives were lost in connection with
their political activism; the spurious ceremony of official government functions
on the left side of the apparatus finds an inverted double in the oppositional
media activities of the Democratic Voice of Burma on the right.
Throughout its tremendous and unruly archive, The Torn First Pages remains
partial in a double sense: it is both fragmentary and subjective rather
than totalizing and objective. This partiality troubles any pretense to fully delivering
over the non-violent struggle for democracy in Burma to comprehension
or visibility. Instead, the gaps between all the fragile paper projections and the
frequent strategy of blacking out certain projections to draw attention to others
summons an image of Burmese history as rent with lacunae and marked by
opacity. It is here that one might locate Kanwar’s engagement with a fifth discursive
function of the documentary, one that Renov adds to his list in a later
article: the ethical. Renov has described the ethical function of documentary as
“its attentiveness to the mutuality and commensurability of self and other, despite
differences of power, status and access to means of representation, a ‘you’
and ‘I’ placed in a delicate balance” and invokes Emmanuel Levinas as an important
thinker of this kind of relation to alterity.
In The Torn First Pages,
Kanwar takes care to negotiate a commitment to making visible multiple facets
of recent Burmese history while circumventing the possible violence that resides
in the ethnographic gaze. He instead incessantly circles back to the limits of
representation, to the points at which the Burmese experience becomes opaque.
Following Levinas, Édouard Glissant has argued that the right to opacity is a
prerequisite to an ethical relation to alterity. Though Glissant does not specifically
invoke the visual, considering his insistence on opacity in relation to documentary
production – a filmic mode with a mandate to make the world visible
– yields insight into the formal strategies of The Torn First Pages. Glissant
suggests that barbarism does not lie in the admission that one does not understand,
but rather in imposing one’s own frameworks of understanding and desire
for transparency on the other in a violent assertion of comprehension that
would reduce the other to the same.
To insist on opacity is to trouble the epistemological
drive of the gaze and to register what cannot be seen as much as
what can. It is to point to the necessary insufficiency of representation and to
undo the arrogant posture that the documentarian might present a complete
picture of the event. One is incessantly caught between the obligation to not
turn away from the other’s pain and the equally pressing obligation to not objectify
the other. In order to circumvent this dilemma, Kanwar intervenes into
the audiovisual archive and insists on producing a set of multiple perspectives
174 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
and meanings. He marshals opacity and partiality in order to negotiate an ethical
relation to the display of images of struggle and violence. He insists on the
way the moving image unrealizes or fictionalizes the referent, while still asserting
that the referent adheres.
In Ma Win Maw Oo, for example, a horrific photograph is refilmed detail by
detail, with blurriness and pulsation obscuring the representational function of
the image. When it does appear, and Ma Win Maw Oo’s corpse and the men
who carry it attain legibility, it is briefly and at a smaller scale, centered in the
frame and surrounded by blackness. Kanwar is interested in interrogating the
status of these images as material artifacts as much as he is mining them for
their testimonial force. One might accuse Kanwar of a dangerous aestheticization
of images of atrocity, of making horror beautiful and consumable. But to do
so would be to neglect to consider these manipulations of the image as strategies
that mediate the potentially violent and exploitative nature of the documentary
gaze while refusing to deny the evidentiary force of the image. There
has been a longstanding opposition, however false it might be, between evidence
and art, beauty and reality. Kanwar willfully trespasses these oppositions
by recruiting aesthetic strategies that will temper the possibility of seeing the
image not as an image but as an unmediated truth. There is a violence to invisibility,
to leaving these abuses unpublicized, but so too is there a violence to
visibility, to subjecting them to a visual economy eager for sensationalized
images of trauma. The fragmentariness of The Torn First Pages serves to mitigate
any pretense to totality or objectivity and acknowledges that the historical
real will invariably exceed its representation. It insists on affective resonance as
much as it does information or argumentation, thereby constructing an alternative
economy of signification that undoes longstanding assumptions that visually
seductive images and incisive commentary are antithetical to one another.
Two Images of Death
Thus far, this chapter has outlined how artists who explore the modes of documentary
and fiction have rehabilitated cinema’s status as a technology of the
virtual through the creation of multiprojection installations. They do so not out
of a simple fascination with illusionism, but to articulate complex aesthetic and
political commitments and to open artists’ cinema to encounters with subjective
and historical experience. In the process, they offer a reflection on the extent to
which the specificity of cinema rests on the tension it stages between referentiality
and representation. Omer Fast’s The Casting invokes the testimonial
powers of the moving image only to demonstrate how they have been comproChapter
4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 175
mised by fiction. As a reaction to this widespread condition, Kutluğ Ataman’s
Women Who Wear Wigs and Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages insist on
the continued importance of the documentary image, but do so while deploying
strategies that mediate any claims to objective truth. In both cases, the artists
acknowledge the old Roman law, testis unus, testis nullus – “one witness is no
witness” – and instead produce polyphonic and collective testimonies that telescope
the singular and the plural, the individual and the collective. In Eija-Liisa
Ahtila’s If  Was , fiction and documentary join into productive contaminations
that allow for the imagination of temporalities and narratives that would
be impossible in either modality alone.
Omer Fast, Nostalgia ().
To conclude this examination of how documentary and fiction have been mobilized
in recent artists’ employments of the moving image, it is worth returning
to this chapter’s beginning, to the work of Omer Fast. A single image from Fast’s
three-part video installation Nostalgia () encapsulates the work’s proposition
concerning the relationship between reality and its representation. In a
science fiction film, a woman lies on the ground in an underground tunnel,
dead or dying. She has been brutally assaulted by police and their dogs. A
close-up on her face pans across to reveal a spatter of vomit that issued from
her mouth. The camera follows along the stream in all of its glistening abjection.
176 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Small, whole blueberries start to appear within it, then strawberries, then flower
petals. As the pan continues, the vomit turns into a vibrant array of cherries,
grapes, roses, figs, pomegranates, daffodils, and other flowers arranged just so.
It is the sole shot throughout the three parts of the installation that breaks from
verisimilitude and yet it might be the shot that most truthfully encapsulates
Nostalgia’s central thesis: from the visceral real of violence, bodily matter, and
death, the camera will find composed beauty. Or, in other words, representation
will betray the real.
Omer Fast, Nostalgia ().
Nostalgia carries on the project of The Casting, though with a more intricate
formal structure and with an increasingly nuanced position taken with regard
to its central issues. The work begins with a :-minute looped video on a flat
screen television. On the soundtrack, the voice of a Nigerian refugee seeking
asylum in London tells of his upbringing, his experiences in England, and discusses
in some detail how one might go about building a trap for a partridge.
On the image track, a white man in a forest builds a similar trap out of sticks.
When the trap goes off, there is a cut away from the forest to the interview that
has occupied the soundtrack. A black man, framed only from the neck down, is
demonstrating how to build the trap in front of a green screen. Fast’s voice is
heard for the first time: “Let’s go back in time. Tell me about where you’re
from.” This prompts the loop to begin again with the man responding, “I’m
from the Niger Delta. I’ve been here for over ten years.” This interview and its
story of building a trap will serve as a generative mechanism for the installation’s
following two components.
The second component of the installation consists of a two-channel video lasting
: minutes, exhibited in a black box on two flat screen monitors. Here,
actors playing Fast and the asylum seeker restage a fictionalized version of the
interview from part one. Adopting the same double screen expansion of the
shot/reverse-shot structure used in The Casting, the Nigerian occupies the
screen on the left and Fast the right. Once again, the Nigerian stands in front of
a green screen, used in industrial filmmaking to impose the desired background
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 177
behind the filmed subject, as if to point to the mutability of context. Though it
deals with many of the same subjects, the tone of this interview is very different
than that of part one. The actor playing Fast (hereafter referred to as “Fast”)
intervenes much more often and displays a visible suspicion toward his interview
subject. Fast’s sole interjection in part one, “Let’s go back in time,” turns
into “I want to go back in time,” as the interviewer asserts control, presses his
subject for details, and becomes irritated when they are not supplied. He is anxious
to hear about the man’s experiences as a child soldier – a potentially lurid
and sensational narrative – but instead is told in detail how to build a trap for
partridges. The story quickly turns from catching a partridge to catching monkeys
to eat or sell to tourists. Instances of disbelief and misunderstanding proliferate.
“Fast” looks bewildered as he asks, “You really eat monkeys?” The jovial
interview subject momentarily turns angry and forces “Fast” to admit that
he has never been to Africa.
This second part of the installation highlights the variable power dynamics
that underwrite the interview situation, as “Fast” paradoxically asserts a certain
authority over his subject and yet requires this subject in order to discover the
narratives he seeks. “Fast” says he is planning to make two movies, one that
will be composed of interviews with asylum seekers and another that will use a
detail from one of these interviews to construct an old science fiction film – projects
that correspond for the first and third parts of Nostalgia. “Fast” is using
the man’s lived experience as material for an art project for which he will claim
sole authorship. Given that Omer Fast does precisely this in both The Casting
and Nostalgia, it is striking that the character of “Fast” is represented as at
best insensitive and at worst exploitative. In this middle section of Nostalgia,
the ethical concerns of the interview form become visible. This is a sharp departure
from The Casting, which confronts neither the issue of authorship nor the
possible injustice of using the soldier’s words as mere fodder for recontextualization.
Might Nostalgia II be a form of autocritique, a self-indictment for absolute
devaluation of documentary that took place in the earlier installation?
The viewer leaves this black box and walks down a dim corridor to reach the
third part of Nostalgia. Unlike the first two sections, which were shot on highdefinition
video and displayed on flat screen televisions, Nostalgia III is a
large-scale projection that was shot on Super mm and transferred to video so
as to achieve an appropriately cinematic look. The :-minute narrative concerns
a post-apocalyptic future in which an unnamed African country, wealthy
and safe, has its fortified borders overrun by Britons fleeing a devastated England.
An underground passage provides a way of circumventing the policed
border. The viewer is introduced to a world in which only aid workers and
hippies visit England to help the country build irrigation systems and in which
schoolchildren give presentations to the class on how things like milk and bread
178 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
were once made. It is an imagination of a dystopian future, but one that might
have stemmed from the mind of the s: old surveillance monitors, clothing
fashion, and rotary telephones bespeak a very different vision of the future than
would be found today. Summoning both the future and the past, its peculiar
temporality is augmented by a non-chronological arrangement of sequences
that are loosely linked together but leave many questions unanswered. A British
man that happens to make it through the tunnel – after selling his bike and a
kidney to traffickers to take him across the “lake” of the Mediterranean – is
interviewed by an African immigration official who offers him citizenship if he
tells her where the underground tunnel is located. She asks him about his life in
England and inquires as to where he found his food. The man describes hunting
and tells her how he made a trap for partridges out of sticks. As the woman
asks, “What kind of sticks?” a new scene begins of the man running through
the underground tunnel with his friends. Police and their dogs pursue the immigrants,
leading to the death of the woman whose vomit metamorphoses into
flowers.
Nostalgia begins with the testimony of a Nigerian refugee and uses it to
generate a series of fictions. The story of the partridge trap reappears across all
three components of the work, linking them together through a detail that
might be thought to function as a metaphor for the process of storytelling itself:
a structure built out of unwieldy bits and pieces that attain a tremendous force
when assembled together in the proper manner, a force that can function as a
trap. Despite the potential criticism of The Casting’s interview techniques
found in part two of the installation, like The Casting, the testimonial value
accorded to interview upon which Nostalgia is based is nil. It functions almost
as a red herring, promptly obliterated by the layers of fabulation that accumulate
on top of it. In these two installations, Fast might be accused of a rather
opportunistic use of the Iraq War and the civil strife in Nigeria, respectively.
They function as germs that flower into fictions, but ultimately the installations
have little to do with them.
Fast himself has equated the tasks of fiction and documentary: “After all, both
‘fiction films’ and ‘documentaries’ present stories that ask for their viewers’ beliefs,
and both activate and suspend their viewers’ judgment with regard to
what they represent.”
This may be the case, but there is a profound ontological
difference between documentary and fiction. Fast’s insistence on subsuming
the documentary image by fictionalization suggests that Nostalgia, like The
Casting, foregrounds the notion that contemporary visual culture is marked
by a crisis of referentiality in which simulation has truly overtaken reality. However,
rather than counteracting this condition, Fast compounds it. In order for
documentary images to function as documents, they require spectators who
will invest in them as such and makers who will treat them sensitively and conChapter
4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 179
textualize them responsibly. Nostalgia refuses to take the document seriously
and thus further exacerbates the crisis of visual evidence that it seeks to diag-
nose.
There is, however, a second image of death in Nostalgia that suggests that
this may not be the case. In the science fiction narrative, the three Britons running
through the tunnel come across an eerie figure. A shirtless man with a
shaved head sits on a chair, facing the wall. His posture is slumped and, given
the circumstances, there is a fair possibility he might be dead. The trio casts a
strange glance at the man as they walk by and continue onwards, hoping to find
asylum. But after they pass, the man looks up, turns back around in his chair
and – despite the fact that he is sitting in an abandoned subway tunnel where
border patrol police search out refugees – begins to watch a film. It is projected
against the wall he originally faced and then comes to occupy the entire screen.
The film is none other than one of the most striking images of Chris Marker’s
Sans soleil: the archival footage of the death of a giraffe.
In Sans soleil, the
giraffe sequence follows a scene at a Japanese zoo where families pay tribute to
the animals that died throughout the year, but as it appears onscreen the voiceover
commentary that runs throughout almost the entirety of the film stops. As
the giraffe is shot, bright red blood spurts out of its neck and it flails around
before lying down on the ground to die.
The image of death is something of a limit case that tests the image’s powers
of documentary and the spectator’s relation to them. As Vivian Sobchack has
written, “The conjunction of death, representation, and documentary film foreground
what is true of all vision as it engages a world and others;” that is, it
generates an “ethically charged” situation in which both filmmaker and spectator
are held accountable for their gazes.
As the single found-footage shot in
Nostalgia, an installation that jettisons an interest in referentiality in favor of a
treatment of the documentary image as fiction, what purpose does this “return
of the real” serve? This image may be seen as the antithesis of the image of
death described above, in which a representation of death is used to critically
comment on the way in which scenes of violence and atrocity are processed by
cinema and television into highly conventionalized forms that aestheticize their
horror. Unlike the representation of the woman’s death, the death of the giraffe
protrudes with the presentational force of the real. It testifies to its persistence
amidst simulation, even though it is an image already familiar from another
film. Images may relate to other images, but they can still relate back to the
real. The death of the giraffe punctures the representational fabric of Nostalgia
and reasserts the manner in which the documentary image can asymptotically
approach the real. It invokes Sans soleil, a docu-fiction hybrid with a marked
investment in the referential image and that interrogates its fate in an age of
electronic media while never relinquishing a commitment to it. The image of
180 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
the giraffe recasts the entire enterprise of Nostalgia as haunted by an outside,
as troubled by the referential value of the image it has worked hard to exclude
from its representational system.
At the end of the world, when the great veneer of simulation has been torn
away and these precarious immigrants truly inhabit the “desert of the real,” a
man still turns his gaze to cinema. As a way of remembering another time, perhaps,
one before whatever unnamed events precipitated the global reorganization
that differentiates this world from our own, or perhaps as an effort to gain
understanding of death when it is close at hand. This would seem to speak to a
faith in the image in spite of the ways in which it has been marshaled by media
spectacle. But the man manifests a glimmer of insanity and the dramatization of
analogue film projection underground while surveillance monitors reign above
suggests an alliance of this apparatus with the outmoded. Perhaps the image of
the giraffe is simply a remnant of another time, an emblem of a relation to the
world through technology that is no longer possible in the futuristic society depicted.
Perhaps it is an instance of nostalgia that lends the installation its title.
This spectator of documentary images might be longing for a lost relation to the
real and pursuing its recovery through cinema, that technology that paradoxically
unrealizes and re-realizes the physical world, creating a lack and compensating
for it by the very same means.
But all of this speculation about the mental and affective state of this character
relates to the world of the fiction, to the diegesis of the third part of Nostalgia.
The image of the giraffe, meanwhile, has exceeded this future anterior science
fiction plot and has recast its images as mere simulacra. The “impression of
reality” carefully manufactured by the installation’s third part is destabilized by
the return of the real that occurs through the excerpt from Sans soleil. The
entire storytelling venture of Nostalgia is thrown into crisis as the image of
the giraffe obliquely points back to all that has been excluded from the story of
the Nigerian refugee as it has been channeled into fictional codes of representation.
The presentation of the animal’s death stands in for the bracketed real that
begins to encroach on Fast’s elaborate fabulation, suggesting its injustice. It signals
that referentiality does indeed persist as long as there are spectators to attend
to it. In the words of Serge Daney, “There has to be some risk and some
virtue, that is, some value, in the act of showing something to someone who is
capable of seeing it. Learning how to ‘read’ the visual and ‘decode’ messages
would be useless if there wasn’t still the minimal, but deep-seated, conviction
that seeing is superior to not seeing...”
Despite its commonalities with The Casting, Nostalgia introduces a measure
of suspicion towards its own strategies that had been absent in the earlier
installation. It moves from simply dismantling the conventions of realism in
film and television to instead question how the notion that all documentary
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 181
images have now become inextricable from fiction might contain some spurious
assumptions of its own. The image of the woman whose vomit turns to flowers
may indict the way violence is processed in fictional cinema, but the prominence
of the giraffe’s death suggests an uneasiness with the outright discrediting
of referentiality that appears in both The Casting and Nostalgia. As Hito
Steyerl has noted, documentary testimony can be unreliable, can lie, and will
not necessarily transmit events in any transparent manner, and yet it “can express
the unimaginable, that which has been silenced, the unknown, the saving,
and even what is monstrous – and thus create the possibility of change.”
To
give up on this possibility of change by depriving documentary images of their
relation to the real is tantamount to a resignation that there is no alternative to
the representational systems that govern today’s mass media. One must attend
to the documentary image with the attention that it demands, seeing in it
neither the truth of the event nor a simulacrum, but a material image to be confronted,
questioned, and considered.
Anne Wagner has suggested that what is missing in Bill Viola’s work is “any
built-in mistrust of his medium... Instead his work insists – sometimes to the
point of coercion and against the grain of his predecessors’ sheer reluctance and
scepticism – that we believe in the magnitude and meaningfulness of what camera
and artist give us to see.”
Certainly, Viola’s work suffers from a technospiritualism
that attempts to spuriously reconstruct subjective wholeness and
auratic experience; Wagner’s critique of the artist undoubtedly holds weight.
However, the opposition that she sets up between a mistrust of the medium
and a belief in the meaningfulness of the referential image must be put into
question. In the work of the artists discussed in this chapter, there is a demonstrable
interest in combining these two qualities. Embracing the power of cinema
as a technology of the virtual does not necessarily mean ceasing to interrogate
the way a medium intervenes between physical reality and its
representation. At times, there is a magnitude and meaningfulness of what the
moving image can present to view and one has an ethical obligation not to look
away but to look sensitively.
As Susan Sontag has written, “To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a
breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated
population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted
into entertainment... It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no
real suffering in the world.”
Precisely because our news media have been converted
into entertainment and precisely because our artistic media increasingly
resemble entertainment, it is necessary to reassert the spaces of the gallery and
museum as institutional and discursive sites that can contest the derealization
of spectacle. By reimagining the relationship between documentary and fiction
– by recognizing their imbrication rather than asserting their ontological equiva-
182 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
lence or refusing them entirely – contemporary artists repurpose an apparatus
that has so often been put in the service of forgetting the world in order to return
to it, while producing a sustained reflection on the status of the moving
image in the process. They locate one of the many specificities of cinema as
residing in its capacity to produce images caught between referentiality and
representation. In this way, though they may leave behind the concentration on
the materiality of the apparatus that had been deemed a progressive attribute of
earlier moving image art in favor of the formerly anathematic qualities of virtuality
and pictorialism, they by no means renounce reflexivity, nor do they
lapse into idealism and mystification. Rather, they constitute a site at which
cinema is embraced and interrogated not as an old medium but as a new way
of bringing art into conversation with existence.
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction 183
Conclusion – “Cinema and...”
And, finally, Z is for Zero – Zero for Conduct, zero visibility, and Godard’s slogan,
“Back to Zero.” As we enter the age of new media, the cinema is reinventing itself.
We need to see that reinvention in radical as well as mainstream terms, to try and
reimagine the cinema as it might have been and as, potentially, it still could be – an
experimental art, constantly renewing itself, as a counter-cinema, as “cinema haunted
by writing.” Back to zero. Begin again. A is for Avant-Garde.
–Peter Wollen
Without a doubt, one must see here neither the completion of cinema nor its death,
but simply the development of this singular situation: next to cinema, which continues
its existence as a celibate art, an exploded and metaphorized cinema is unfolding,
muddling the borders of the art that is now becoming art.
–Jacques Rancière
In his “Alphabet of Cinema,” Peter Wollen implies that the age of new media
constitutes something of an end for cinema, but also an opportunity to begin
again. This chance at recommencement is borne precisely of the ways in which
digitization has prompted a simultaneous compromise and reassertion of the
boundaries of cinema. “Z is for zero”: a point that marks both a complete exhaustion
and a reservoir of possibility from which the new might spring; “Z”
arrives at the end of the alphabetic sequence but as the “Z” of zero, it is also a
beginning. In the preceding pages, I have attempted to provide an overview of
one site where such a new beginning is occurring: contemporary art. This book
has traced the emergence of what I have called, in a slight adjustment of Raymond
Bellour’s term, the “othered cinema” – that is, a cinema that has become
other to itself by entering into aggregate formations with elements and institutions
that have historically not been a part of it. This emergence takes place, as
Jacques Rancière suggests, alongside what has traditionally been considered to
be cinema, both paralleling it and commenting on it. It must be noted, however,
that the continued existence of this traditional cinema may not be as “celibate”
as Rancière takes it to be; rather, Rancière provides a better description of the
contemporary situation when he speaks of a muddling of borders.
Throughout the preceding chapters, I have argued that the increased integration
of cinema into the spaces of art after  enables a rethinking of the histories
of cinema and provides a microcosm in which to take account of its con-
temporary mutations and its possible futures. This integration abides by a tension
between old and new media: older than new media and newer than old
media, cinema enters the gallery under the specter of mass cultural obsolescence
but also infuses that space with spectacular novelty. Over the past two
decades, curators, artists, and critics have conceived of cinema as an old medium
linked to cult value, historicity, and patrimonial inheritance. Notions of
ruination and refuse come to figure the way elements of this now old apparatus
persist and reappear in new configurations. This becoming-old of cinema in an
age of new media is important, for it not only traces a historical trajectory that
sees cinema change from a technological novelty at the end of nineteenth century
to an old medium at the beginning of the twenty-first, but also opens the
possibility of extrapolating from this to think about how today’s new media will
one day become old as well.
Alongside this senescent cinema, the spectacular novelty of cinema continues
to exert a prominence and a deep-seated fascination within the gallery and
without. Just as the multiplexes have recently turned (once again) to the technological
marvel of -D to ensure box office revenues, so have museums exploited
the sensory possibilities of large-scale projected images in their efforts to maintain
relevance and appeal to broad demographics. The new technology of video
projection and its mobilization as a part of a broader transformation of the museum
space have constituted one major site of cinema’s novelty within an art
context, but it is matched by another: the ability of these moving image practices
to forge the novelty of the blind spot, the newness that disturbs established
frameworks of understanding. I have unfolded this tension between old and
new across four primary sites of inquiry: the way cinema transforms the space
of the museum and is transformed by it, uses of celluloid that align the material
of film with a spectral historicity, practices of remaking that ambivalently call
upon cinema as a lost site of collectivity, and multiprojection installations that
hybridize the modes of fiction and documentary in order to investigate subjective
and historical experience.
With these propositions established, it is now time to return to the primary
question I posed in the introduction, namely: how does the progressive integration
of film into the gallery and the museum, as it mutates and fractures, change
our conception of cinema? The characterization of cinema as older than new
media but newer than old media is one principal answer to this question. But
what other answers might obtain? To rephrase the question: if the tendency
under discussion here “exhibits cinema” in the sense of holding it out for examination,
what qualities or attributes – other than an interplay between novelty
and obsolescence – are repeatedly exhibited or “held out”?
Whereas the investigations into cinematic specificity undertaken by artists in
the s and s tended to focus on the materiality of the apparatus, contem-
186 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
porary artists interested in exhibiting cinema partake of a different kind of reflexivity,
fastening on to the cinema’s historical and social dimensions and foregoing
materiality as their primary focus. They allow one to see anew what the
cinema has been all along, though not always recognized as such: an institution
at once public and historical that extends far beyond the hegemony of the fiction
feature and that is in conversation with competing media forms. It may sound
obvious and uncontroversial to characterize cinema in this manner, but it is in
fact quite different from conceiving of the cinema as a primarily narrative form
made for the purposes of entertainment, as have many popular cinemas, or
from seeing it as a pure entity used for formal experiments of light and sound,
as the avant-garde so often has. These four attributes emerge as particularly
salient features of the institution as anatomized in contemporary art. It is worth
examining each one briefly.
• publicity: Though the cinema has always been a public institution, canonical
accounts of filmic spectatorship advanced in the s focused on the twoterm
relation of the spectator to the screen. Instead, echoing Walter Benjamin’s
notion of cinema as allowing “room for play” and more recent accounts of cinema
as an alternative public sphere, the othered cinema evinces a distinct emphasis
on cinema as a public institution throughout its many facets. The museum
and gallery emerge as public sites of spectatorship in an era marked by
individual, domestic viewing, while many artists take up questions of collectivity,
sociality, and publicity in their work.
• history: Cinema has come a long way as a historical institution since the
era in which film prints were burned as soon as they were no longer commercially
exploitable. Throughout the twentieth century, one may glimpse moments
at which the cinema manifested an interest in its own history – be it in the
found-footage genre of the avant-garde or in Hollywood’s homages to the silent
era such as Sunset Boulevard () and The Night of the Hunter () –
and others at which it served as a way of investigating historical experience. In
contemporary artists’ uses of the moving image, such concerns become primary.
A desire to grapple with the history of cinema through cinema is paramount.
Celluloid’s link to a spectral historicity is underlined repeatedly. Artists question
the way Hollywood has informed our understanding of historical events and
engage the moving image as a way of grappling with historical experience. Owing
to the digitization of media (which both recasts analogue specificity and
allows for the easy recycling of footage), tied to fears of the institution’s future,
and in reaction to a postmodern waning of historicity, the othered cinema is a
key site at which the relationship between cinema and history has been investigated.
This relationship has three primary facets: the history of cinema, the historicity
of analogue film, and the notion of the moving image as producing a
historical archive through the recording of actuality.
Conclusion – “Cinema and...” 187
• beyond the fiction feature: The hegemony of the fiction feature film has
held strong since the consolidation of the form in the late s, but alternatives
to it have always existed. It is precisely such alternatives that achieve a new
regularity and visibility in the othered cinema. Documentary and non-narrative
forms are common, as are extremely short works and works too long to be apprehended
in a single museum visit. In a single piece, the viewer might encounter
one projection or a dozen and these projections might be frontal, immersive,
or even cast onto objects. The projector might be hidden or exposed as sculptural
element of the installation. Quite simply, a principle of variability obtains,
taking the cinema back to the multiple exhibition situations and nonstandardized
formal structures that marked both its preinstitutional years and the extrainstitutional
experiments of the avant-garde. From the permutational narratives
of Stan Douglas to the movie theater protocols of Jeroen de Rijke and
Willem de Rooij, from the multiprojection documentary of Amar Kanwar to the
extreme slowness of Douglas Gordon, this unleashing of cinematic heterogeneity
and multiplicity emerges as one of the most striking attributes of the othered
cinema, mirroring the new malleability and transportability of cinema witnessed
across the cultural field in the wake of digitization.
• competition of media forms: As noted in chapter two, though it is all too
often forgotten, cinema has always existed within a competitive media environment.
This has never been truer than today, when a multimediascape of miniature
devices, gigantic video billboards, and everything in between has definitively
dislodged the traditional viewing situation of cinema as the primary site
for the consumption of moving images. Cinema is both in competition and in
aggregate formations not only with television, its long-time opponent, but also
with video games, amusement park rides, mobile phones, and the Internet. The
othered cinema is constitutive of an arena in which this contemporary “battle of
the images,” to use Bellour’s term, is not only witnessed, but also critically interrogated.
The relationships between convergence/specificity and hybridity/purity
are relentlessly negotiated, whether it is in the return to mm as an outmoded
device, in cross-medium remakes, or in the creation of new intermedial
configurations that bring elements of cinema into confrontation with those of
other media. The idea of cinema that one finds exhibited in contemporary art
today is one of contaminated media forms that may no longer be considered
outside of their encounters with one another. Infrastructures, personnel, modes
of production, aesthetics, and technologies are shared between cinema, art, and
a broader visual culture.
Given the scale and significance of this development, if art history is to keep
pace with the developments of contemporary art, it must expand into the vocabularies
and methodologies of film studies. And if film studies is to keep pace
with the changing shape of its object, it must take seriously cinema beyond
188 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
what has traditionally been considered to be cinema. Together, both of these
disciplines must confront the implications of digitization, not merely at the level
of materiality but also as it affects the time and space of aesthetic experience, the
relation between image and commodity, the parameters and mandates of cultural
institutions, and the understanding of history. In this regard, these disciplines
might learn much from the artistic practices confronted throughout this
study, for these are precisely the issues they address. At stake here is the need to
maintain an attention to specificity of the aggregate formations that arise while
at the same time making interdisciplinary connections in order to best grapple
with interstitial objects of study.
In a tribute to Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour attempts to describe the
contribution Metz made to the study of film, using Foucault’s concept of the
fondateur de discursivité, or “founder of discursivity,” to do so.
He writes,
Which would, then, be discursivity established by Metz, the equivalent of his “Marxism,”
his “psychoanalysis,” his “archaeology,” and mainly of what is implied by the
rather diabolical force of the singular effect Foucault tries to recover? In my opinion,
neither the semiology of the cinema, nor the relation postulated between psychoanalysis
and the cinema, nor the sum of both, nor the one modified and enriched by the
other. Put in a simpler and more secretive way, a movement which, closer and beyond
the relation it established, appears to consist in the establishing of the relation in itself,
the and. It is the force, at once simple and unexpected, which consists in saying cinema
and...: and thus accepting all the consequences.
Bellour locates, then, at the very foundation of what is now considered to be
orthodox film studies, a transgressive “and....” This small conjunction functions
to describe the ways in which, from its beginnings in the academy, film studies
has always opened onto an outside and has made use of this outside while retaining
an attention to the aesthetic, historical, and material specificities of cinema.
Though the contemporary moment is one in which the discipline feels in
crisis in large part due to the uncertain status of its object, it by no means is time
to invoke the call to order and imperative to obey inherent in the term “discipline”
in an attempt to shore up the boundaries of what properly does or does
not belong to it.
Rather, this state of affairs means that it is more than ever the
time to reinvigorate the study of cinema by returning to Metz’s wager of “cinema
and...” Saying “cinema and...” is very different than asserting an undifferentiated
plane of converged media forms. It is, rather, to understand the selfdifference
of cinema as always engaged in a process of becoming-other while
still maintaining an investment in the rich traditions of both film history and
film theory.
In this study, I have drawn upon many insights that stem from the film theoretical
tradition embodied by Metz’s dare of the “and,” modestly attempting to
Conclusion – “Cinema and...” 189
propose another conjunction – cinema and contemporary art – and to accept all
the consequences. I have brought the history of film theory in conversation with
developments in contemporary art to argue that these contributions to art history
are also contributions to film history. These are artworks that move beyond
the movie theater – and the television, the laptop, the tablet computer, the
smartphone, the airplane seat, and even the minivan screen – to find new ways
of exhibiting cinema.
190 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Notes
Introduction – The Othered Cinema
. Bruno Racine, “Avant-propos,” in Le Mouvement des images (Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, ), .
. Furthermore, as Lynne Kirby notes in her study, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and
Silent Cinema, “As a machine of vision and an instrument for conquering space and
time, the train is a mechanical double for the cinema and for the transport of the
spectator into fiction, fantasy, and dream.” See: Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The
Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, ), . For an account
of the perceptual and temporal changes brought about by locomotive travel and its
affinities to cinema, see: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The
Industrialization of Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University
of California Press, ), -.
. The railroad companies were the first to institute standardized time in order to
facilitate scheduling departures and arrivals, imposing a single time on 
November . For an overview of the function of standardized and subjective
time in the late nineteenth century, see: Stephen Kern, The Culture of Space and Time:
- (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), -.
. On the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde, see: Bart Testa, Back
and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, ).
. Stan Douglas, quoted in: “Diana Thater in Conversation with Stan Douglas,” in
Stan Douglas (London: Phaidon, ), .
. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London:
Verso, ), .
. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
(Second Version),” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings,
Volume : -, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), -.
. Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Remaking Cinema,” in Cinema, Cinema: Contemporary Art
and the Cinematic Experience (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, ), ; Catherine
Fowler, “Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time from Maya Deren
to Eija-Liisa Ahtila,” Screen , no.  (): -. The term “gallery film” is
imprecise given that many such “films” are in fact videos and/or may include
substantial installation components.
. Chrissie Iles, “Issues in the New Cinematic Aesthetic in Video,” in Saving the Image:
Art after Film, ed. Tanya Leighton and Pavel Büchler (Glasgow and Manchester:
Centre for Contemporary Arts and Manchester Metropolitan University, ), .
. A substantial but not exhaustive chronological list of such exhibitions includes
Passages de l’image (Centre Georges Pompidou, ), Illusion – Emotion – Realität,
 Jahre Kino: Die . Kunst auf der Suche nach den  Andern (Kunsthaus Zürich,
Zurich, ), Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since  (Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, ), Scream and Scream Again (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford,
), Spellbound (Hayward Gallery, London, ), Notorious: Hitchcock and
Contemporary Art (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, ), Cinéma Cinéma: Art and
the Cinematic Experience (Van Abbemuseum, Rotterdam, ), Between Cinema and a
Hard Place (Tate Modern, London, ), Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales (Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris, ), Image Stream (Wexner Center for the Arts,
Columbus, Ohio, ), Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, -
(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, ), Future Cinema: The Cinematic
Imaginary after Film (ZKM, Karlsruhe, ), Cut: Film as Found Object in
Contemporary Video (Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, ), Beyond Cinema:
The Art of Projection (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, ), Kino wie noch nie (Generali
Foundation, Vienna, ), Le Mouvement des images (Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, ), Collateral: When Art Looks at Cinema (Hangar Bicocca, Milan, ), The
Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image (Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington D.C., ), Vorspannkino (Kunst-Werke, Berlin, ), and Moving
Pictures: Art and Cinema from  to the Present Day (Ostwall Museum, Dortmund,
).
. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, following Marshall McLuhan, use the term
“remediation” to refer to the tendency of new media to incorporate characteristics
of old media in order to better convey a sense of immediacy through a deployment
of the familiar. While Bolter and Grusin assert that remediation is nothing new and
may not be seen as a property exclusive to new media, they do emphasize that the
contemporary moment raises the question of how old media are integrated into
new media in a manner more urgent than ever before, since what may be said to be
“new” about new media is bound up precisely with the relation they construct to
older media. “Transcoding” is taken from Lev Manovich, who calls it the “most
substantial consequence of the computerization of media.” See: David Jay Bolter
and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press,
), ; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, ),
.
. In his  book, The Virtual Life of Film, D.N. Rodowick emphasizes that “the
difficulty of placing film as an object grounding an area of study does not begin
with the digital ‘virtualization’ of the image. Indeed one might say that the entire
history of the medium, and of the critical thought that has accompanied it, has
returned incessantly to film’s uncertain status.” See: David Rodowick, The Virtual
Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), .
. See: Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press,
), .
. Raymond Bellour, “Of An Other Cinema,” in Black Box Illuminated, ed. Sara
Arrhenius, Magdalena Malm, and Cristina Ricupero (Stockholm: Propexus, ),
; emphasis in text.
. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ), .
. This translation is unfortunate since it risks confusing the notion of the dispositif
with that of the appareil, which designates solely technological components. The
dispositif encompasses the appareil and much more, as per the definition provided by
Foucault.
. See: Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst in
192 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), -.
. Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, -, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon,
), ; translation modified.
. Iris Barry, quoted in: Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art
and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. Theodor Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
. Benjamin, .
. For a general account of these fears, see: Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Twenty-five
Reasons Why It’s All Over,” in The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the
Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York University Press, ), -.
. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT
Press, ), .
. Hal Foster, “Contemporary Art and Spectacle,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural
Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, ), -.
. Ibid., n; emphasis in text.
. Longo, Salle, and Schnabel would all go on to direct mainstream feature films.
Longo and Salle would make the one-offs Johnny Mnemonic () and Search
and Destroy (), respectively; meanwhile, Schnabel would forge a successful
career in filmmaking, with Basquiat (), Before Night Falls (), and The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillion, ). In an
echo of this trio’s move into the director’s chair, some figures who have risen to
prominence as makers of the moving image for a gallery context have recently
ventured into feature filmmaking: Steve McQueen’s Hunger () won the
Caméra d’or at the Cannes Film Festival and has been followed by Shame ();
Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy () chronicles John Lennon’s childhood;
Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan, )
premiered at the Venice Film Festival in  and won the Silver Lion for best
director after the artist had completed two installations, Munis () and Feazeh
(), also based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel; Pipilotti Rist’s Pepperminta
(), which also premiered at Venice, shares footage with Rist’s  Museum of
Modern Art installation, Pour Your Body Out ( Cubic Meters).
. The entire credit listing for each episode of The Cremaster Cycle is found in
Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, ed. Nancy Spector (New York:
Guggenheim Museum Publications, ), -.
. See: Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October
 (Fall ): -.
. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,  and .
. Ibid., .
. Jacques Rancière, “Le cinéma dans le ‘fin’ de l’art,” Cahiers du cinéma  (December
): ; translation mine.
. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London:
Verso, ), .
. Exemplary of this tendency is the research project Media Matters, undertaken by the
Tate Modern in  in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
Notes 193
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the New Art Trust. The project is
designed to provide guidelines for the preservation, loaning, and acquisition of
time-based media. See: www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/matters-media-art, accessed
 July .
. Bill Horrigan, “Five Years Later,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed.
Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing and Afterall Books, ), -.
. Dominique Païni, Le Temps exposé: Le cinéma de la salle au museé (Paris: Cahiers du
cinéma, ), ; translation mine.
. Jonathan Walley, “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde,” in Art and the
Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing and
Afterall Books, ), -.
. Though the limited edition is the primary model of distribution in the art world,
important alternatives do exist, such as Electronic Arts Intermix in New York and
Video Data Bank in Chicago, both of which rent video art much as Canyon Cinema
and Film-Makers Cooperative do film prints.
. Matthias Müller, quoted in: Scott MacDonald and Matthias Müller, “A Conversation,”
in The Memo Book: The Films and Videos of Matthias Müller, ed. Stefanie Schulte
Strathaus (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk , ), .
. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, “Introduction: Reconsidering the Documentary and
Contemporary Art,” in The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and
Contemporary Art # (Berlin and Annandale-on-Hudson: Sternberg Press and
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, ), .
. On the side of art history, the marginalization of film is bound up in its links to mass
culture and its basis in mechanical reproducibility. In film studies, many fruitful
interactions between experimental film and the gallery in the United States have
been closed off in part due to the hegemony of P. Adams Sitney’s approach in
Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, -, which neglects to take into
account filmmaking by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Robert Whitman, or the
Fluxus group and instead advocates for a category of “experimental filmmaker” to
be recognized separately from that of “visual artist.” Thankfully, recent years have
seen a proliferation of publications and exhibitions dealing with the question of
artists’ film in a way that moves distinctly outside the canons of both art history and
experimental film to look at the use of film within the gallery beginning in the s
and continuing into the present. A notable contribution in this regard is Chrissie
Iles’  Whitney Museum exhibition, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American
Art, -, which highlighted exchanges between the worlds of experimental
cinema and gallery art and demonstrated the ways in which the two interpenetrated
greatly. See: Chrissie Iles, ed., Into the Light: The Projected Image in American
Art, - (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art Books, ); P.
Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, -, Third Edition
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ).
. Tanya Leighton, introduction to Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed.
Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing and Afterall Books, ), .
. Philip Dodd has suggested that the division between film studies and art history is
reinforced not only by disciplinary boundaries, but also by the fact that the
discipline of film studies emerged primarily out of language and literature
departments, something that might contribute to the emphasis on feature-length
194 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
narrative. See: Philip Dodd, “Modern Stories,” in Spellbound: Art and Film, ed. Ian
Christie and Philip Dodd (London: Hayward Gallery and British Film Institute,
), .
. Lindsay places his book in the context of the art institute and the museum, stating
an interest in developing non-commercial film practices and believing that “motion
picture art is a great high art, not a process of commercial manufacture” (). He
makes comparisons to other plastic arts and to music: the “action film” is sculpturein-motion,
the “intimate film” is painting-in-motion, and “splendour films” are
architecture-in-motion. He looks back at various works of art in museums and sees
them both as prefiguring element of cinema and as providing a place where
filmmakers could go to learn. See: Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture
(New York: The Modern Library, ).
. Jean-Luc Godard, “Africa Speaks of the End and the Means,” in Godard on Godard,
ed. and trans. Tom Milne (New York: The Viking Press, ), .
. Jonas Mekas, “On New Directions, On Anti-Art, On the Old and the New in Art,”
The Village Voice ( November ), reprinted in Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The
Rise of a New American Cinema, - (New York: Macmillan, ), .
Chapter 1 – Architectures of Exhibition
. “Ephemeral cinema, eager for eternity.” Dominique Païni, Le Temps exposé: Le cinéma
de la salle au musée (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, ), ; translation mine.
. David M. Lubin, “Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales,” Artforum (November ):
.
. Of his terminological preference for “cinephiliac moment” over “cinephilic
moment,” Willemen writes that it “is my preferred description because of its
overtones of necrophilia, of relating to something that is dead, past, but alive in
memory. So there is a kind of necrophilia involved, and I don’t mean that
negatively.” See: Paul Willemen, “Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered,”
in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .
. Dominique Païni, “Rapprochements, constellations, resemblances, construction,” in
Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales, ed. Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval (Milan:
Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, ), ; translation mine, emphasis in text.
. Ibid, ; translation mine.
. Thomas Elsaesser has provided an overview of the myriad faces of the director, so
striking in its diversity that it is worth quoting at length: “To each his or her own:
academics have praised Hitchcock for defending family values but also for
sadistically intertwining love, lust and death. He has been compared to Shakespeare
and Mozart, and ‘outed’ as an eternal Catholic racked with guilt. Writers have
identified a misogynist Hitchcock and a feminist Hitchcock, an Oedipal Hitchcock,
a homophobe Hitchcock and a ‘queer’ Hitchcock. There is the cold-war anticommunist
Hitchcock of Topaz and Torn Curtain, and the hot-war anti-fascist not
only of Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent and Notorious, but also present in
Shadow of a Doubt. He has made fun of psychoanalysis in Rear Window and
Psycho, but he is Jacques Lacan’s best interpreter. There is a Gothic-Romantic, a
Notes 195
Victorian, an Edwardian Hitchcock, with his imagination steeped in E.A. Poe and
French decadence, and a Modernist Hitchcock, influenced in turn by Weimar
Expressionism, French Surrealism and Russian montage constructivism. And of
course, there is the postmodern Hitchcock, already deconstructing his own
presuppositions in Vertigo or Family Plot. The ‘British Hitchcock’ has been
given new cultural contours and local history roots, to balance the general
preference for his American period. And in recent years, we have had Hitchcock the
Philosopher: but which philosopher? There is a Schopenhauerian Hitchcock, a
Heideggerian Hitchcock and a Derridean Hitchcock, several Deleuzian Hitchcocks,
a stab at a Nietzschean Hitchcock (Rope, of course) and most recently, a
Wittgensteinian Hitchcock.” See: Thomas Elsaesser, “Casting Around: Hitchcock’s
Absence,” in Johan Grimonprez: Looking for Alfred, ed. Steven Bode (Ostfildern and
London: Hatje Cantz and Film and Video Umbrella, ), .
. Laura Mulvey, Death  Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reaktion, ), .
. Ibid., .
. For more on this topic, see: Erika Balsom, “Dial ‘M’ for Museum: The Hitchcock of
Contemporary Art,” Hitchcock Annual  (): -.
. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ),  and .
. Francesco Casetti, “The Filmic Experience: An Introduction,” (March ), ;
available online: http://francescocasetti.files.wordpress.com///filmicexperience.pdf,
accessed  July .
. Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of
Reality,” differences: a journal of feminist and cultural studies , no.  (): -.
. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, and Christine van Assche, introduction to
Passages de l’image, trans. James Eddy (Barcelona: Centre Cultural de la Fundacio
Caixa de Pensions, ), .
. Bellour’s concept of the entre-image designates intermedial practices situated at the
intersection of discrete media. See: Raymond Bellour, L'Entre-images: Photo, Cinéma,
Vidéo (Paris: La Différence, ).
. See: Raymond Bellour, “Battle of the Images,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic
Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffery Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press,
), -.
. Bellour, David, and van Assche, .
. The entire list of the films and videos included in the exhibition is available in the
catalogue, but a representative sampling includes: The Crazy Ray (Paris qui dort,
René Clair, ); Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, -); News From Home
(Chantal Akerman, ); Zelig (Woody Allen, ); Cézanne (Jean-Marie Straub
and Danièle Huillet, ), The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse (Der Tausend
Augen des Doktor Mabuse, Fritz Lang, ), as well as videotapes from Vito
Acconci, Nam June Paik, and Peter Campus.
. In her “Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind
Krauss refers to the “filmic model” as a way to begin conceiving of the self-differing
nature of all media. See: Rosalind Krauss, “Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of
the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, ), .
196 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. Antoine de Baecque, “Passages de l’image: Iconoclastes, iconolâtres,” Cahiers du
cinéma  (September ): ; translation mine, emphasis in text.
. It is worth noting that there are significant phenomenological and ontological
differences between analogue and digital projection. See: John Belton, “Digital
Cinema: A False Revolution,” October  (Spring ): .
. Other key examples of early video projection include the use of monochrome
cathode ray tube projectors during the performances of Alex Hay, Robert
Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman at  Evenings: Theater and
Engineering at the Armory in New York City in  and the Projected Video
exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in , curated by John
Hanhardt and employing the Advent Telebeam projector.
. David Galloway, “Documenta : The Bottom Line,” Art in America , no. 
(September ): .
. Eduard Beauchamp, quoted in: Galloway, ; Giancarlo Politi, “A Documenta to
Reflect On,” Flash Art International , no.  (October ): ; Dan Cameron,
“The Hassle in Kassel,” Artforum (September ): .
. Philippe Piguet, “Documenta IX: état des lieux,” L’Oeil  (September ): ;
translation mine.
. Barbara London, “Video Spaces: Eight Installations,” in Video Spaces: Eight
Installations, ed. Barbara London (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Harry
N. Abrams, Inc., ), .
. Gary Hill, quoted in: Regina Cornwell, “Gary Hill: Interview,” Art Monthly 
(October ): ; emphasis in text.
. Païni, Le temps exposé, .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., , emphasis in text.
. Brooks Barnes, “Audiences Laughed to Forget Troubles,” New York Times (
December ); available online: http://www.nytimes.com////movies/
yearend.html, accessed  July .
. Raymond Bellour, “Saving the Image,” in Saving the Image: Art after Film, ed. Tanya
Leighton and Pavel Büchler (Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, ), -.
. Ibid., .
. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin writes that painting was
“redeemed from sin by Niépce and Lumière,” this “sin” being an obsession with
likeness. See: André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is
Cinema? Volume One, trans. and ed. Hugh Grey (Berkeley: University of California
Press, ), .
. Thomas Elsaesser, “Peter Greenaway,” in Spellbound: Art and Film, ed. Ian Christie
and Philip Dodd (London: Hayward Gallery, ), -.
. O’Doherty, ; Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press,
), .
. O’Doherty, .
. Alexander Horwath, “Second Lives – The Documenta  Film Programme”;
available online: www.documenta.de/.html?&L=, accessed  May .
. Helen Chang, “Sátántangó,” Frieze  (September ): .
. On this phenomenon, see: Tom Csaszar, “The Spectacular, Record-Breaking, SoldOut,
Smash-Hit Blockbuster Supershow!: A Phenomenon of Museum Culture,”
Notes 197
New Art Examiner  (December-January -): -; “Special Section:
Museum Blockbuster,” Art in America  (June ): -; “Art History and the
‘Blockbuster’ Exhibition,” Art Bulletin  (September ): -.
. Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 
(Autumn ): .
. James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (New York: Thames and
Hudson, ), .
. Shelley Rice, “Three Shows on Time and Movement,” Aperture  (Spring ):
.
. “Unwinding” is the catalogue’s rather unfortunate translation of the French
défilement, which refers to the successive passage of film frames through the
projector. “Unwinding” fails to capture the centrality of seriality to this section of
the exhibition, which featured works such as Donald Judd’s Stack (), selections
from On Kawara’s Today series (), and Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (,
albeit as mounted on the wall rather than as a projection).
. Philippe-Alain Michaud, quoted in: Emmanuelle Lequeux, “La Vie rêvée des
images,” Beaux Arts Magazine  (May ): ; translation mine.
. Bruno Racine, “Avant-propos,” Le Mouvement des images (Paris: Éditions du Centre
Pompidou, ), 
. Alexander Horwath, “Does the Museum Fail? Podium Discussion at the rd
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen,” in Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’
Cinema, ed. Mike Sperlinger and Ian White (Köln: Verlag der Büchhandlung
Walther König, ),  and .
. Philippe-Alain Michaud, quoted in: Morel Guillaume, “L’actualité vue par PhilippeAlain
Michaud, conservateur au Musée nationale d’art moderne,” Le Journal des Arts
 ( April ); available online: http://www.artclair.com/jda/archives/e-docs/
///E/document_entretien.php, accessed  July ; translation mine.
. Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” trans.
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, October  (Spring ):  and .
. Le Mouvement des images ran from  April  to  January ; Godard’s Voyage(s)
en utopie ran from  May to  August.
. See: Serge Daney, “Le thérrorisé (Pédagogie godardienne),” in La Rampe: Cahier
critique, - (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, ), -.
. For a description of the original Collage(s) de France project, see: Dominique
Païni, “According to JLG...” trans. Michael Witt, Rouge  (), available online: ,
www.rouge.com.au//according_jlg.html accessed  July .
. The titles of these rooms were to be: Myth (Allegory), Humanity (The Image), The
Camera (Metaphor), The Film(s) (Duty(s)), Alliance (The Unconscious, Totem,
Taboo), The Bastards (Parable), The Real (Daydream), Murder (Sesame, Theorem,
Montage), and The Tomb (Fable).
. Bamchade Pourvali, “Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, -: à la
recherche d’un théorème perdu” exhibition pamphlet (Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, ): np.
. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, ), .
198 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. James Quandt, “Double Exposure,” Artforum (September ): .
. Antoine de Baecque, “L’‘expo Godard’, compromissions impossibles,” Libération (
July ); available online: http://www.liberation.fr/cahier-special/-lexpo-godard-compromissions-impossibles,
accessed  July ; translation mine.
. Sperlinger and White, -.
. “L’art n’était pas à l’abri du temps, il était l’abri du temps”; translation mine.
. See, for example, Catherine Fowler, “Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and
Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija-Liisa Ahtila,” Screen , no.  (Winter ):
; Chrissie Iles, “Between Still and Moving Image,” in Into the Light: The Projected
Image in American Art, -, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
), -; Tanya Leighton, introduction to Art and the Moving Image: A Critical
Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing and Afterall Books, ), .
. See: Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory
Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, ), -;
Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst,
in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), -; and Christian Metz, “Identification,
Mirror,” in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, ), -.
. To encapsulate the bibliography of challenges to Screen theory’s model of
spectatorship could be the topic of an entire doctoral dissertation, as the diverse
positions range from feminism, cognitivism, phenomenology, postcolonial theory,
queer theory, cultural studies, and new historiography. However, for an overview of
the impasses of psychoanalytic film theory’s model of spectatorship and some
responses to it, see: Linda Williams, introduction to Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing
Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), -.
. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October  (Winter ): -
.
. Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT
Press, ), .
. Païni, Le temps exposé, .
. Adrian Searle, “Talking Heads: Küba by Kutlug Ataman, Sorting Office, New
Oxford Street, London,” The Guardian ( March ); available online: http://
www.guardian.co.uk/culture//mar//, accessed  July .
. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ), .
. It is worth noting that Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij tried to combat this
problem by assigning scheduled screening times for the viewing of their films, as
did Steve McQueen in his  Venice Biennale installation at the British Pavilion,
Giardini (), but such a practice is rare. In the case of de Rijke and de Rooij,
these scheduled screening times result in intervals during which no film is
projected. The empty white room questions the perpetual availability of images
both within the gallery and in culture at large. As Pamela M. Lee has written, “The
‘capacity for a film to be absent,’ as de Rooij has said, is indivisible from our
Notes 199
expectations of the image and from the particular sway cinematic conditions
maintain over our everyday habits of perception.” See: Pamela M. Lee, “Jeroen de
Rijke/Willem de Rooij: A Portfolio,” Artforum (March ): .
. Volker Pantenburg, “ and Beyond: Experimental Cinema and Installation Art,”
in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker
Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler (Vienna: Synema/Filmmuseum Wien, ), .
. Raymond Bellour, “Of An Other Cinema,” in Black Box Illuminated, ed. Sara
Arrhenius, Magdelena Malm, and Cristina Ricupero (Stockholm: Propexus, ),
.
. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), ; Anne
Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), .
. Païni, Le temps exposé, .
. See, for example: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), -; Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space” and
“On Suture” in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ),
-.
. Biesenbach resigned as head of the department in fall  to become head curator
at MoMA’s contemporary art projects space, P.S.. He retains the title of “chief
curator at large” at the Modern.
. Hal Foster, quoted in: Yve-Alain Bois, et al., Art Since : Modernism
Antimodernism Postmodernism, Volume :  to the Present (New York: Thames
and Hudson, ), .
. Ibid.
. Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” in The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Writings, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, ), -.
. Doug Aitken, Broken Screen:  Conversations with Doug Aitken Expanding the Image,
Breaking the Narrative, ed. Noel Daniel (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.,
), -.
. Peter Eleey, “The Exploded Drive-in,” in Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers, ed. Emily Hall
(New York: Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time, ), .
. See, for example, Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization
(Cambridge: MIT Press, ) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and
Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge: MIT Press, ).
. Deleuze, .
. This is not, however, to suggest that the use of strategies of fragmentation and nonlinearity
are inherently aligned with an affirmative stance towards late capitalism.
. MoMA director Glenn Lowry, quoted in: Museum of Modern Art and Creative
Time press release, “MoMA and Creative Time Present Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers.
Large-Scale Cinematic Installation to Be Projected onto the Facades of The Museum
of Modern Art, Rhythms and Energies of New York and Its Inhabitants Inspire
Major Public Artwork” ( January ), ; available online: http://press.moma.
org/wp-content/press-archives/PRESS_RELEASE_ARCHIVE/Aitkenpressrelease.
pdf, accessed  July .
200 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. See: Alan S. Oser, “Perspectives: Great White Way; Planning for a Brighter Times
Square,” New York Times ( December ); available online: http://www.nytimes.
com////realestate/perspectives-great-white-way-planning-for-a-brightertimes-sq.html,
accessed  July .
. Mayor Bloomberg: “Last year, a record  million tourists visited New York City,
with nearly % of them visiting our cultural offerings, and through the help of
exceptional art events such as Sleepwalkers, we expect to surpass that total this
year.” Quoted in: “MoMA and Creative Time Present Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers,”
.
. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, ), .
. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc.,
), .
. Jerry Saltz, “MoMA’s Sex Change,” New York Magazine ( December );
available online: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews//, accessed  July .
. Karen Rosenberg, “Tiptoe by the Tulips (or Stretch by the Apples),” New York Times
( November ); available online: http://www.nytimes.com////arts/
design/rist.html, accessed  July .
. For a reading of Rist’s earlier work as feminist, see: Elizabeth Mangini, “Pipilotti’s
Pickle: Making Meaning from the Feminine Position,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance
Art , no.  (May ): -.
. Dorothy Spears, “Pipilotti Rist: MOMA,” Art in America , no.  (January ):
.
. Volker Pantenburg, “‘Post-Cinema?’ Movies, Museums, Mutations,” SITE Magazine
 (): .
. Roger M. Buergel, “Arbeiten an den Grenzen des Realen,” Texte zur Kunst , no. 
(September ): ; quoted and translated in: Pantenburg, “Post-Cinema?” .
. Deleuze, .
. Enthusiasm for projection has always been matched by suspicion. From the earliest
magic lantern shows in the seventeenth century, despite projection’s alliance with
science of optics, it was equally associated with charlatanism and superstition. The
magic lantern was also called the “lantern of fear.” This is to say nothing of Plato’s
allegory of the cave, nor its resuscitation in art history by Diderot or Robert
Smithson or in film theory by Jean-Louis Baudry.
Chapter 2 – Filmic Ruins
. Tacita Dean, “Artist Questionnaire:  Responses,” October  (Spring ): .
. Tacita Dean, “The Green Ray,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, ed. Rina Caravajal
(Milan: Edizioni Charta, ), .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. In Christian Keathley’s revealingly titled Cinephilia and History: or The Wind in the
Trees, the author begins with the following quote from D.W. Griffith: “What’s
missing from the movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.”
Notes 201
In the introduction, he writes that, “This fetishization of marginal, otherwise
ordinary details in the motion picture image is as old as the cinema itself,” before
proceeding to invoke the legendary fascination early spectators had with the wind
in the trees. This apocrypha perhaps finds its source in Georges Sadoul’s Histoire
générale du cinéma, in a chapter on Lumière titled “La Nature même prise sur le fait,
ou les raisons du succès de L’Arroseur arrosé”: “In the background, in the
garden, the leaves quivered in the sun, a detail that a spectator of today would have
to make an effort to distinguish, but that filled the crowds of  with
enthusiasm.” Sadoul’s remark that such a detail surely would not be remarked
upon today is revealing in the present context, for “today” in Sadoul’s text refers to
a historical moment () considerably different from our own, when indeed
people are once again remarking on the “wind in the trees” of the film image. See:
Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, Or the Wind in the Trees (Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, ), ii and ; Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma:
Tome , L’Invention du cinéma, - (Paris: Denoël, ), ; translation mine.
. Though Kentridge’s practice does include the use of both mm and mm film, I
have excluded it from my consideration here of mm gallery practices due to the
artist’s heavy reliance on video and, crucially, the choice to transfer the pieces to
video for projection within the exhibition space. My choice to focus on artists such
as Dean and Buckingham in contrast to Coleman and Kentridge will also become
important later in this chapter with regard to Rosalind Krauss’ call to “reinvent the
medium,” for these latter two artists are precisely those named in the closing lines
of her book, “A Voyage on the North Sea.” See: Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the
North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and
Hudson, ), .
. Hal Foster, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 
(Spring ): .
. Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of
Possible Futures?” in Old Media, New Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy
Chun and Thomas Keenan (London: Routledge, ), .
. Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero,” The New Yorker ( October ); available online:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting////fa_fact_eakin?currentPage=all,
accessed  July .
. The strategy of aligning analogue film with disappearance has even pervaded
mainstream American feature filmmaking, with varying success. David Fincher’s
fantasy of reversible time, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (),
simulates aged film stock to convey a sense of historicity within a film that
otherwise presents a Forrest Gump-esque cartoonish and digitally enhanced past.
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler () is markedly more effective as a
meditation on the melancholy of time’s passing, using mm blown up to mm
to produce an aesthetic of grainy senescence that matches the film’s portrait of an
aging professional wrestler.
. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and
Hypotheses,” Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, and Video Texts, -
(Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, ), .
. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ), -.
202 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, ),
.
. Lessing emphasizes the physical structure of a medium, putting forth that the
proper subject matter for a given medium can be extrapolated from its form. See:
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York: Noonday Press, ). According to
Greenberg, with modern art, “It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area
of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its
medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of
each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the
medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’
find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.” See:
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism:
Volume Four, Modernism with a Vengeance, -, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, ), .
. While Donald Judd’s “specific objects” might appear to fulfil the modernist
enterprise in their reductive forms, they also contradict the injunctions to the
discreteness of media, to opticality, and to apprehension in a single instant by
temporalizing perception and insisting on the thickness of bodily, phenomenological
experience. For a close examination of minimalism as both the apogee and
breaking point of modernism, see: Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The
Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), -; on the overcoming of the
traditional boundaries of the medium see: Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in
Donald Judd: Complete Writings - (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, -); and for the canonical indictment of the
temporalization of perception induced by minimalism and its “theatricality,” see:
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood [],” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), -.
. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” -.
. Ibid., . The emphasis on the generative restriction of historically determined
conventions forges a link between Krauss’ formulation and Stanley Cavell’s notion
of “automatisms” – recently resurrected in film studies by D.N. Rodowick in his
discussion of “variable specificity” – which similarly looks to a set of conventions to
provide enabling limitations for the creation of new work. Cavell prefers the word
automatism to medium, stating that “the use of the word seems to me right for both
the broad genres or forms in which an art organizes itself...and those local events or
topoi around which a genre precipitates itself...[I]n mastering a tradition one masters
a range of automatisms upon which the tradition maintains itself, and in deploying
them, one’s work is assured of a place in that tradition.” Key to the notion and
perhaps central to Cavell’s choice to leave behind the term “medium” is that it
extends beyond the physical support of the work. See: Stanley Cavell, The World
Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
), ; D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, ), .
. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the AvantGarde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), -.
Notes 203
. See: Rosalind Krauss, “...And Then Turn Away? An Essay on James Coleman,” in
James Coleman, ed. George Baker (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), -; Rosalind
Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry , no.  (Winter ): -;
Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,”
October  (Spring ): -; and Rosalind Krauss, “Two Moments from the PostMedium
Condition,” October  (Spring ): -. A slightly different version of
the second essay listed here is available as “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction
to Photograph,” in James Coleman, ed. George Baker (Cambridge: MIT Press, ),
-.
. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” .
. Alan Kaprow, quoted in: Yve-Alain Bois, et al., Art Since : Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Volume :  to the Present (London: Thames and
Hudson, ), .
. The term “postmodernism of resistance” comes from Hal Foster, “(Post)Modern
Polemics,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Culture Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, ), .
See also: Hal Foster, introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern
Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, ), xii-xiii.
. Thanks to Sebastian Campos for this formulation.
. Krauss has stated, “And if I as a critic have any responsibility now, it is to dissociate
myself from this attack on the medium, and to speak for its importance, which is to
say for the continuance of modernism. I don’t know if poststructuralism will help
me to do this, and thus I don’t know if I can maintain my earlier commitment to this
methodological option.” See: Rosalind Krauss, quoted in: Bois, et al., . Krauss’
notion that in installation art, “art essentially finds itself complicit with a
globalization of the image in the service of capital” disturbingly posits that the
work’s ideological position is strictly determined according to its relation to the
medium in a manner strikingly reminiscent of Greenberg. The stakes of Krauss’
recent return to the unity and autonomy of the work of art will be explored further
as this chapter progresses. See: Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” ; emphasis
added.
. Michael Newman, “Medium and Event in the Work of Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean:
Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate, ), ; emphasis added.
. Paul Arthur, “Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film,”
October  (Spring ): .
. Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of
Reality,” differences: a journal of feminist and cultural studies , no.  (): .
. Raymond Bellour, “Battle of the Images,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary
after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), -;
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,”
in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), -.
. Ibid., .
. Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier (), for example, is a thirteen-minute film
serving as a prologue to his feature The Darjeeling Limited (). The short was
screened in some theaters before the feature, but many viewers saw it as a free
download from the Apple iTunes store, where it was made available one month
before the film’s wide ( screen) release, racking up some , downloads. See:
204 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Lia Miller, “‘Darjeeling’ to be Paired With a Short,” New York Times ( October
); available online: http://www.nytimes.com////business/media/darjeeling.html,
accessed  July .
. Bellour, “Battle of the Images,” .
. See André Bazin, “Pour un cinéma impur,” somewhat unfortunately translated as
“In Defence of Mixed Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Volume One, trans. and ed. Hugh
Grey (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), -.
. Bellour, “Battle of the Images,” .
. Bazin, .
. Ibid., ; emphasis added.
. Jessica Morgan, “Time after Time,” in Time Zones: Recent Film and Video (Tate:
London, ), 
. Indeed, de Rijke and de Rooij were the only artists to show work on film in ’s
Time Zones, the Tate Modern’s first major exhibition devoted to the moving image.
Other participating artists included Francis Alys, Fikret Atay, Yael Bartana, Yang
Fudong, Anri Sala, Bojan Sarcevic, Wolfgang Staehle, and Fiona Tan. The exhibition
took place from  October - January .
. Peter Gidal, Blow Job (London: Afterall Books, ), .
. Ina Blom, “Director’s Cut (Beauty Operations),” in De Rijke/De Rooij: Director’s Cut,
ed. Ina Blom (Oslo: The National Museum of Contemporary Art/Museet for
Samtidskunst, ), .
. Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,”
differences: a journal of feminist and cultural studies , no.  (): .
. For the canonical formulation of this operation, see: Christian Metz, “Disavowal,
Fetishism,” in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia
Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, ), -.
. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The
Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), .
. Lovink does, however, temper such rhetoric by emphasizing that one must not
forget the “notworking” of networking and replace the lived experience of digital
media with “disgust for the perfect simulacrum.” See: Jean Baudrillard, The
Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Berg, ), ;
Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (London:
Routledge, ), -; Paul Virilio, “The Visual Crash,” trans. Bernard G.
Prusak, in CTRL [space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed.
Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Wiebel (Cambridge: MIT Press, ),
.
. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .
. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, ), .
. One representative of this tendency is Stephen Prince, who, in his “True Lies:
Perceptual Realism, Digital Images and Film Theory,” argues that realism should be
considered a matter of perception rather than reference and explicitly ties the idea
of realism as concerned with reference as linked to indexicality, thus partaking of
the tendency to conflate the iconic with the indexical. See: Stephen Prince, “True
Notes 205
Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly , no. 
(Spring ): -.
. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, ), .
. For an investigation into the mythology of this founding moment, see: Tom
Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous
Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, ed.
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), -.
. Vanessa Joan Müller, “Forever and a Day,” in Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij: After the
Hunt, ed. Veit Loers, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Caroline Schneider (New York:
Lukas and Sternberg, ), .
. Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, quoted in: Nicolaus Schafhausen, “Interview
with de Rijke/de Rooij: If Only All Rooms Would So Clearly Fulfill Their Purpose,”
in Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij: After the Hunt, ed. Veit Loers, Nicolaus
Schafhausen, and Caroline Schneider (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, ), .
. In Camera Lucida, Barthes repeatedly returns to the speed of the cinema and the
sense that one may never grasp hold of its images. While this partially has to do
with the fact that one may hold onto a photograph (something not possible in the
cinema), it also is a matter of the frozen temporality of the photograph compared to
the impression of life generated by movement in the cinema. He writes, “...in the
cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it
does not make a claim in favour of its reality, it does not protest its former existence;
it does not cling to me: it is not a spectre. Like the real world, the filmic world is
sustained by the presumption that, as Husserl says, ‘the experience will constantly
continue to flow by in the same constitutive style’; but the Photograph breaks the
‘constitutive style’ (this is its astonishment); it is without future (this is its pathos, its
melancholy); in it, no protensity, whereas the cinema is protensive, hence in no way
melancholic (what is it, then? –It is, then, simply ‘normal,’ like life).” See: Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, ), -.
. Schafhausen, .
. T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale
University Press, ), .
. Ibid., .
. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), .
. “Movie Kodak Made for Individual Users,” New York Times, January  (): .
. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art
Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. See: Wasson, -. It should also be emphasized that the availability of reduction
prints in mm were crucial to the development of film studies as a discipline, as it
would have been prohibitively expensive for university departments to rent and
project mm.
. Foremost among such exceptions would be de Rijke and de Rooij’s employment of
mm, as discussed above. Only three of their films have been made in mm – Of
Three Men (), Bantar Gebang (), and Untitled () – all of which are
206 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
single ten-minute takes. The rest of their moving image work has been completed
on mm film.
. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter, in Selected Writings, Volume Two, Part Two: -, ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, ), -.
. Ibid., .
. Rodney Graham, quoted in: gallery label text, Multiplex: Directions in Art,  to
Now ( November - July ), Museum of Modern Art, New York;
available online: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%
AAD%AE%A&page_number=&template_id=&sort_order=, accessed
 July .
. Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October  (Spring ): .
. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, -. True to this formulation but with a
very different agenda and approach, David Bordwell writes that, “Time in the
classical film is a vehicle for causality, not a process to be investigated on its own,”
and like Doane, designates the device of crosscutting as central to this temporal
economy. See: David Bordwell, “Time in the Classical Film,” in David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to  (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital
Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, ), .
. Ibid., .
. Tacita Dean, “Historical Fiction,” Artforum (March ): .
. Dean, “Artist Questionnaire,” .
. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), .
. Guy Debord, “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (),” in Guy Debord,
Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb
(Oakland: AK Press, ), -; translation modified.
. Matthew Buckingham, quoted in: Godfrey, .
. This tense is also called the futur antérieur de rétrospection/de bilan, or the future
anterior of retrospection or assessment, since it involves passing judgment on an
event in the present of the past with knowledge of future developments. An
example of this tense would be “C’était un homme qui n’aura jamais été puni pour
ses crimes,” roughly translatable as “This was a man who was never to be punished
for his crimes.” The relationship here to that which “will have been” has striking
parallels to Barthes’ discussion of photography in Camera Lucida, where he aligns
the tense of the photograph with the future anterior. He writes that in the
photograph, “I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.
By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in
the future.” See: Barthes, Camera Lucida, .
. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” .
. Charles Baudelaire, quoted in: Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume Four: -, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, ), .
Notes 207
. Adorno’s position is developed throughout his body of work, but finds special
emphasis throughout his Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ).
. Responding to Krauss’ use of the term, Yve-Alain Bois has stated, “As a concept
kitsch seems very dated – it has been replaced by spectacle.” See: Yve-Alain Bois,
quoted in: Bois, et al., . Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art
and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, ), ; quoted in: Rosalind
Krauss, “Two Moments,” .
. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” .
. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” .
. Krauss, “...And Then Turn Away?” . Though, it must also be noted that the slide
projector did fulfill an important function much closer to gallery than to the
“internationalist commercialization of culture” – it was the main method of image
dissemination in the art history classroom until the popular availability of data
projectors.
. Ibid., -.
. In this respect, Krauss’ reading of Coleman is very different than Raymond
Bellour’s. While Krauss relates her view of Coleman to that of Bellour, the latter’s
concept of entre-images depends on fragmentation, intermediality, and the
suspension of heterogeneous elements in a way that deviates significantly from
Krauss’ notion of reinventing the medium. The entre-image designates work at the
intersection of discrete media, and is, for Bellour, a question of “morality and
energy”: intermediality is not just the homogenization of convergence, but also a
site of possibility generated by hybridization, confrontation, and metamorphosis
(). Though he does refer to Coleman’s use of the slide projection with voice-over as
his “great reinvention,” perhaps implicitly gesturing towards Krauss’ reading of the
artist, Bellour insists on the unresolved “love of the heterogeneous” found in
Coleman’s work and sees it as dealing with the very impossibility of closure ( and
). For Bellour, intermedial art is not inherently problematic and complicit with
capital as it is for Krauss. Bellour does not call for a return to modernist autonomy,
but rather following Leo Steinberg’s suggestion in “Other Criteria,” a thinking
about the medium by breaching its limits, by opening on to an outside. See:
Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo (Paris: La Différence, );
Raymond Bellour, “The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead),” trans. George
Baker, in James Coleman, ed. George Baker (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), -; Leo
Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century
Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), -.
. In her article, “Lack of Fit: Tacita Dean, Modernism, and the Sculptural Film,”
Tamara Trodd notes that “Several critics have pointed out that this film explores a
structure of medium specificity: using the lighthouse as a light-projecting device, its
rotation, and the cast shadow and flicker it produces, to re-perform the filmic
apparatus.” See: Tamara Trodd, “Lack of Fit: Tacita Dean, Modernism, and the
Sculptural Film,” Art History , no.  (June ): .
. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso,
), .
. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, .
208 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, ), ; emphasis in text.
. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, .
. Ibid.
. Michael Newman, “Sauvetage,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books – Essays (Paris: Éditions
des Musées de la Ville de Paris and Steidl Publishers, ), np.
. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, ), .
. See: Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. “Le cinéma substitue à notre regard un monde qui s'accorde à nos désirs” is spoken
by Godard in the opening credits to Contempt (Le Mépris, ) and falsely
attributed to Bazin. In fact, this misquotation is drawn from Michel Mourlet’s “Sur
un art ignoré,” in which he writes, “Le cinéma est un regard qui se substitue au
nôtre pour nous donner un monde accordé à nos désirs.” Death  Times a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image is the title of Laura Mulvey’s  book, while the
notion that cinema is “death at work” has been attributed to Jean Cocteau by
Godard, among others. See: Michel Mourlet, “Sur un art ignoré,” Cahiers du cinéma
 (August ) -; Jean Cocteau, quoted in: Jean-Luc Godard, “From Critic to
Filmmaker: Godard in Interview (extracts),” trans. Tom Milne, in Cahiers du cinéma,
The s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), .
. This is particularly evident in the publication accompanying Dean’s  Turbine
Hall commission at Tate Modern, FILM. The catalogue assembles contributions
from a large number of artists, curators, and scholars concerning the fate of
analogue film in a digital age and includes a strip of mm film as a bookmark.
Also of note is the artist’s heavily publicized campaign to ensure continued
laboratory processing for mm film and her proposal that film should be protected
by UNESCO as world cultural heritage. See: Nicholas Cullinan, ed., Tacita Dean:
FILM (London: Tate Publishing, ); Tacita Dean, “Save Celluloid, For Art’s
Sake,” The Guardian ( February ); available online: http://www.guardian.co.
uk/artanddesign//feb//tacita-dean-mm-film, accessed  July ; J. Paul
Getty Trust press release, “Artist Tacita Dean to Visit Getty to Discuss UNESCO
Proposal to Recognize Film as World Cultural Heritage” ( April ); available
online: http://news.getty.edu/article_display.cfm?article_id=, accessed  July
.
. Demolition began on  February .
. Tacita Dean, “Palast,” in Film Works, ed. Rina Caravajal (Milan: Edizioni Charta,
), .
. Tacita Dean, “Fernsehturm: Backwards into the Future,” in Tacita Dean: Seven
Books – Selected Writings (Paris: Éditions des Musées de la Ville de Paris and Steidl
Publishers, ), np.
. Nabokov writes, “Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as
something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so
seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might
then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object.
Notes 209
It might be fun.” Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill
International, Inc, ), .
. This is a position Trodd repeats word for word at the end of her essay, “Lack of Fit:
Tacita Dean, Modernism, and the Sculptural Film.” Trodd’s assertion that Dean’s
work cannot be seen as reactivating a “utopian promise dormant in cinema” is
weak indeed, suggesting even that this is supported by the fact that Dean’s is a
failed cinema since it is not made for movie theater exhibition, thereby revealing an
incredibly narrow understanding of cinema and what it might mean to excavate an
alternative future for it. See: Tamara Trodd, “Film at the End of the Twentieth
Century: Obsolescence and the Medium in the Work of Tacita Dean,” Object 
(-): .
. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, nd ed., s.v. “anachronism.”
. Trodd, “Film at the End of the Twentieth Century,” .
. Mattias Frey, “No(ir) Place to Go: Spatial Anxiety and Sartorial Intertextuality in Die
Unberührbare,” Cinema Journal , no.  (Summer ): .
. See: Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The AntiAesthetic:
Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press,
), -.
. Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT
Press, ), ; Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room  (Spring
): .
. Ibid.
. Svetlana Boym, “Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia,” Cabinet  (Winter -): .
. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
(Second Version),” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings,
Volume Three: -, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., -.
. Ibid., . In Capital, Marx uses the example of a table to discuss the animistic magic
of the commodity: “It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to
all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain
grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free
will.” See: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben
Fowkes (London, Penguin, ), -.
. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” -.
. This is the position of Peter Bürger, who in his Theory of the Avant-Garde argues that
the avant-garde negates the following determinations essential to autonomous art:
the disjunction of art and the praxis of life, individual production, individual
reception, and reception as detached from production. The use of film can be seen
as an important intervention on the first three of these four postulates. See: Peter
Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ), .
. Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldisch, “Keeping Time: On Collecting Film and Video
Art in the Museum,” in Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Bruce
Altshuler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .
210 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. Jonathan Walley, “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde,” in Art and the
Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing and
Afterall Books, ), .
. Paul Young, “Black Box White Cube,” Art and Auction (February ); available
online: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story//black-box-white-cube//, accessed
 July .
. Scott MacDonald, “mm: Reports of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated; In Focus:
The Death of mm?” Cinema Journal , no.  (Spring ): .
. Hansen writes, “The notion of aura as a premonition of future catastrophe harks
back to medical theories since antiquity that use the term to describe symptoms of
anxiety and unease preceding and foreboding epileptic or hysterical attacks. For
Benjamin, the ominous aspect of aura belongs to the realm of the daemonic, in
particular the phenomenon of self-alienating encounters with an older, other self. In
a technologically refracted, specifically modern form, this aspect of aura resurfaces
in his notion of an optical unconscious, which he unfolds from the passage about
the Dauthendey portrait...” See: Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry
 (Winter ): .
. Ibid., .
. Notably, the “atmosphere” discussed here is precisely the aura Hansen seeks to
recover throughout her essay. Though Hansen does footnote the “Surrealism” essay
as an example of one of the “productive reflections on the reconfiguration of
distance and proximity in modernity, specifically as they revolve around new
economies of body and image space and the role of film in enabling a collective,
playful innervation of technology,” this passage curiously escapes her extensive
research on the concept of aura. The original text reads, “Sie bringen die gewaltigen
Krafte der ‘Stimmung’ zur Explosion, die in diesen Dingen verborgen sind.” Instead
of the more scientific Atmosphäre, the use of Stimmung suggests a more figurative
usage linked to tone, feeling, or mood – in short, it describes the affective pull of the
outmoded object. The emphasis placed on this word through the use of quotation
marks signals its importance as a concept that carries beyond this particular context
and may be linked to the lesser-known understanding of aura explored by Hansen.
See: Hansen, ; Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume Two, Part One:
-, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), ; Walter Benjamin, “Der
Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europaeischen Intelligenz,” in
Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften  (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ), .
. Metz, .
. Ibid., .
Chapter 3 – The Remake: Old Movies, New Narratives
. Serge Daney, “Journal de l’an passé,” Trafic  (Winter ): ; translation mine.
. Paramount Pictures Corporation vs. Chris Moukarbel, “Complaint for Copyright
Infringement” ( June ), . All legal documents related to the Paramount
Pictures Corporation vs. Chris Moukarbel lawsuit appear courtesy of the artist.
Notes 211
. Paramount’s lawyers stated that the company has spent $ million on producing
the film and had or would spend $ million on advertising. See: Paramount
Pictures Corporation vs. Chris Moukarbel, “Plaintiff’s Memorandum in Support of
its Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction” ( June
): .
. Chris Moukarbel, quoted in: Felicia R. Lee, “An Artist Releases a New Film After
Paramount Blocks His First,” New York Times ( July ); available online: http://
www.nytimes.com////movies/film.html, accessed  July .
. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso,
), .
. It is perhaps this method of online distribution that resulted in Moukarbel being
sued when so many other artists remaking and recycling Hollywood films – many
of them discussed in this chapter – have remained protected from litigation even
though they profit substantially from the enterprise.
. This service, available at http://www.whois.domaintools.com/, allows the user to
obtain the name and address of any domain name registrant, as well as other
significant information such as the number and geographical location of visitors to
the site.
. Jack Valenti, quoted in: Amy Harmon, “Black Hawk Download: Moving Beyond
Music, Pirates Use New Tools to Turn the Net into an Illicit Video Club,” New York
Times ( January ); available online: http://www.nytimes.com////
technology/black-hawk-download-moving-beyond-music-pirates-use-new-toolsturn-net-into.html,
accessed  July .
. Paramount vs. Moukarbel, “Plaintiff’s memorandum,” .
. Ibid., .
. Unnamed Paramount spokeswoman, quoted in: Sarah Mishkin, “Alumnus denies
allegations of copyright infringement,” Yale Daily News ( June ); available
online: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news//jun//alumnus-denies-allegations-of-copyright//,
accessed  July .
. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock
Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: The Penguin Press, ), .
. Moukarbel complied with this request, but later produced a response to the lawsuit
in the summer  exhibition Datamining, curated by Joe Scanlan at Wallspace in
New York City. Moukarbel exhibited a re-cut version of World Trade Center 
comprised of outtakes from on set and including no dialogue from the World
Trade Center screenplay, as well as the complete text of the destroyed video and
facsimiles of the lawsuit.
. Chris Moukarbel, quoted in: Lee, op. cit.
. “Derivative” is used here in a non-pejorative manner. The Copyright Act of the
United States defines a derivative work as “a work based upon one or more
preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization,
fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction,
abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast,
transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations,
elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work
of authorship, is a ‘derivative work.’” See: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/
/, accessed  July .
212 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology,
trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, ), -;
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ).
. Lessig, .
. Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), .
. As Michel Serres has shown, “parasite” is a term with a rich polysemy. In a
biological sense, the parasite is an organism who takes without giving anything in
return, weakening its host but not killing it through the instantiation of a one-way
vector of (ab)use. The parasite may also refer to a social parasite, such as a guest at a
dinner party. But significantly, the French language offers an important third
meaning of the word that is absent in English but extremely apposite to the
description of the relationship between Hollywood and these artists’ remakes as
“parasitical”: the word parasite in French designates static or noise. According to
this final meaning, the parasite interrupts a channel of communication, disturbs a
message. Through the use of the prefix para-, the parasite also designates that
which is beside or next to; this notion of proximity is also important to the closeness
of the sometimes ambivalent relation these works set up to their “host” movie
compared to the distanced critique of previous generations. See: Michel Serres, The
Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
).
. Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, ), .
. Colors belongs to a series of works that remake the products of film history using
new media technologies to reflect upon the ways cinema has been subject to the
laws of the algorithm and the database. Arcangel used a slit scan technique to
sample a horizontal row of colours from a single frame of Dennis Hopper’s Colors
() and extend them vertically to form a video of undulating vertical lines. The
source film’s audio plays in real time, but the image track must repeat some thirtythree
days in order to display the “entire” film. While the source material is
skeletally preserved by maintaining the integrity of the soundtrack, the
representational function of the visual field has been eclipsed by a play of colour.
Other works of this variety include Jim Campbell’s Illuminated Average #
(), Vuk Cosic’s ASCII History of Moving Images (), Kevin and Jennifer
McCoy’s Learning from Las Vegas () and : A Space Algorithm (),
Jason Salavon’s Top Grossing Films series (-), and Wolfgang Staehle’s
Empire / (-). Sam Taylor-Wood’s Still Life and A Little Death
belong to a series of works that remake classical paintings as moving image
artworks to investigate the temporalities of the painted and moving images as well
as to comment on the integration of film and video into the museum. Other works
of this tendency include Eve Sussman’s  Seconds at Alcazar (), a staging of
Velásquez’s Las Meninas () in a -degree pan, and her feature-length The
Rape of the Sabine Women (), which takes up Jacques-Louis David’s 
depiction of that theme. Bill Viola’s The Greeting () and The Quintet of the
Notes 213
Astonished () draw on the mise-en-scène of renaissance paintings to produce
slow-motion investigations of human emotion and expression.
. Chrissie Iles, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October
 (Spring, ): .
. Telephone conversation with the author,  April .
. Radical Software Group used custom-designed software to eliminate all white
characters. A computer isolated each shot of the film and then did “blob detection”
– that is, it scanned every shot for a small oval over a small rectangle so as to
identify a human figure. Once this “blob” had been isolated, the pixels therein
would be scanned for hue, resulting in a decision to keep or exclude the shot. The
result is that almost all dialogue and individuated characters are deleted, leaving a
teeming mass of African bodies to fight and/or be killed. Black Hawk Down is
ostensibly about a Somali conflict, but it becomes clear throughout this re-edit the
extent to which this event is used as a mere backdrop for an action movie blow out
that will reproduce jingoistic American values of the heroism of overseas
intervention.
. Conversation with the author,  March .
. Douglas Gordon, quoted in: Emmanuel Hermange “‘Pour nous, le cinéma est mort’:
Notes sur quelques stratégies cinéphiles de l’art,” Parachute  (July-September
): ; translation mine.
. Pierre Bismuth, quoted in: Thierry Davila, “Inventing Consciousness,” trans. C.
Penwarden, Art Press  (September ): .
. It should be noted that the French scénario is used not only in the sense of an outline
or sequence of events designated by the English “scenario,” but also may be
translated as “screenplay.”
. Pierre Huyghe, quoted in: Emmanuelle Lequeux, “La Vie rêvée des images,” Beaux
Arts Magazine  (May ): ; translation mine.
. Raymond Bellour, “Le Corps de la fiction,” Trafic  (Summer ): , translation
mine.
. See: Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, ), -.
. Ibid., .
. There are, of course, important examples that defy such easy categorization and/or
engage in hybrid categories. Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory (), for
example, employs recycling, reenactment, and interviewing. These categories are
intended as a schematic guide to the variety of practices included in the umbrella
heading of the “remake,” but it must be understood that they are by no means
mutually exclusive.
. On this trend in contemporary art, see: Sven Lütticken, ed. Life, Once More: Forms of
Reenactment in Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: Witte de With, ) and Inke Arns
and Gabriele Horn, eds., History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Reenactment in
Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, ).
. Brian De Palma, that grand pasticheur, is a recurring interest of Dellsperger’s, making
up eleven out of the twenty-four existing installments of the body double series and
lending that series its title. body double  and  (both ) remake scenes from
Body Double () including the -degree pan around the kiss on the beach, a
clear reference to Scottie (James Stewart) and Judy’s (Kim Novak) eerie union in
214 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Vertigo (). body double  and  (both ) take up Sisters (), a story of
pathological doubling, while body double  () remakes body double ’s
() remake of the pick-up scene at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from
Dressed To Kill. Though the series does include remakes of other filmmakers,
such as David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, and Stanley Kubrick, the overwhelming
presence of De Palma is significant as it allows Dellsperger to explore multiplying
layers of citation and performance. De Palma’s cinema is a cinema of the copy,
integrating numerous references to Hitchcock and others into his decidedly
unoriginal filmmaking. True to the preoccupations of Hitchcock, mistaken identity,
doppelgängers, and fatal coincidences abound. De Palma repeats texts that already
contain within them mirrorings and repetitions, thus rendering Dellsperger’s
reenactments of De Palma repetitions of repetitions of repetitions, the origin of
which infinitely recedes.
. Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site, and Screen (London:
Intellect, ), .
. Indeed, often filmmakers use amateur footage, educational films, and footage of
which they themselves may not know the provenance, such as Peggy Ahwesh’s The
Color of Love (). This is in all probability due to the material restrictions of
working on film rather than video. Found-footage works made on film would need
to make use of whatever scraps of stock were available, while video allows for easy,
accessible copies of well-known films to be appropriated for recycling. Despite this
material limitation, in the s, filmmakers such as Martin Arnold, Peter
Tscherkassky, and Matthias Müller all came to prominence with found-footage
films of recycled Hollywood movies. While Arnold and Müller would later work in
a gallery context, Tscherkassky has stayed within the exhibition situation of the
movie theater. For an in-depth discussion of the found-footage genre of
experimental filmmaking, see: William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and
Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, ).
. Gordon has provided a detailed account of the math involved in determining this
length and says of the project, “It’s quite simply a question of time. How can one
film, which lasts only two hours, possibly convey the fear, the desperation, the
heartache, the real ‘searching and waiting and hoping’ that my father had tried to
explain to me when I was younger? How can anyone even try to sum up five
miserable years in only  minutes? Now, it’s important to say that this is not a
criticism directed at John Ford, nor the motives behind making the movie. But, for
me, it does open a gap in the way we experience the experience of cinema; and this
is the basis of my proposal.” See: Douglas Gordon, “...an apology as a short story/a
short story as an apology,” in Douglas Gordon: Kidnapping (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van
Abbemuseum, ), -.
. Bulloch describes the process as such: “It is tremendously laborious to make these
works. I work directly with one person only [Holger Friese] to make these
programmes. For example, there are  cubes in Z Point and in each one of those
cubes are three lamps, three channels, and if you think about the duration – it is
’” looped, that makes ” – so for each of those seconds, there are  x 
changes or shifts in value made ( x  =   different values in this piece). On
a human scale, it is hard to imagine so many changes of values simultaneously...”
Notes 215
Angela Bulloch, quoted in: Maria Walsh, “The Light Fantastic: Angela Bulloch
Interviewed by Maria Walsh,” Art Monthly  (December-January -): .
. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, ), .
. Ibid., -.
. As the editorial notes of issue three of the Internationale Situationniste, entitled “The
Meaning of Decay in Art” explain, “For revolutionaries, there can be no turning
back. The world of artistic expression, whatever its content, has already lapsed. It
repeats itself scandalously in order to keep going as long as the dominant society
succeeds in preserving the privation and scarcity that are the anachronistic
conditions of its reign.” See: “Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art,” trans.
John Shepley, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents,
ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), ; originally printed in
Internationale Situationniste  (December ): -.
. There are occasional uses of mm film and video by the earlier generation, but as a
rule photography functioned as the medium of choice. Particularly worth
mentioning in this context is Jack Goldstein’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (), a
two-minute mm film that loops found footage of the MGM lion logo that appears
at the beginning of the studio’s films. In video, Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/
Transformation: Wonder Woman (-) is an important precedent to the
work under consideration here.
. Mark Godfrey, “Pierre Huyghe’s Double Spectacle,” Grey Room  (Summer ):
.
. D.N. Rodowick uses the term “political modernism” to refer to “the expression of a
desire to combine semiotic and ideological analysis with the development of an
avant-garde aesthetic practice dedicated to the production of radical social effects.”
See: D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in
Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), -.
. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the
World, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, ),  and ;
emphasis in text.
. It is in relation to this “post VCR art” that Bourriaud cites the very same Serge
Daney text used as the epigraph to this chapter. Tellingly, Bourriaud misquotes
Daney to write, “...[Post VCR art] explains Serge Daney’s prediction about film: ‘The
only thing that will be retained (from art) is what can be remade.’” Bourriaud’s
misquotation is slight but significant, especially given that he radically changes the
context and meaning of Daney’s statement without making note of it. Daney was
writing of the tragedy of how profitable it was for “the entertainment industry to
simply remake ‘epic films’ [films de légende] – and only those.” Bourriaud changes this
lamentation to an exhilaration concerning the artistic possibilities afforded by home
viewing technologies. See: Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon
Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris: les presses du réel, ), ; emphasis in text,
and Daney, ; emphasis in text, translation mine.
. “Making do” is the accepted translation of the French se débrouiller, which also
means “to cope” or “to get along.” A famous example of “making do” is the
perruque, or wig. Here, the worker diverts labour time towards his or her own,
personal work. De Certeau provides the example of a secretary who might use
216 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
company time to write a love letter. See: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), ;
Bourriaud, Postproduction, .
. Ibid., . The word “programmer” brings with it a perhaps purposeful ambiguity.
Bourriaud’s constant return to digital media tropes makes it possible that he is
making reference to a computer programmer. However, the word also invokes
resonances of a culture worker, such as a film programmer or even a curator. Given
Bourriaud’s status as an international curator whose fame in some ways eclipses
that of the artists with whom he works, this second meaning has added interest. Is
the intent to suggest that artists are now learning from curators how best to be
artists?
. See: Sven Lütticken, “Progressive Striptease: Performance Ideology Past and
Present,” in Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
), .
. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emery, in
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ),  and .
. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 
. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
), .
. Bourriaud, Postproduction, .
. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
. Tom McDonough, “No Ghost,” October  (Fall ): .
. De Certeau, .
. Ibid., v.
. Internet utopianism is central to the vocabulary of Postproduction, which includes
terms such as “download” (-) “hacking” () and “programming” ().
Bourriaud also makes an analogy between the postproduction artist and the Web
surfer, writing that both are “semionauts” that navigate “the links, the likely
relations between disparate sites” (). “[W]e surf on a network of signs,” while the
artwork is a “site of navigation” ().
. For example, the  Copyright Term Extension Act (also known as the Sonny
Bono Act) serves to extend copyright the life of the author plus seventy years or to
 years after creation or ninety-five years after publication (whichever is earlier)
for works of corporate authorship. This represents an extension of twenty years
over the Copyright Act of . Aside from extending copyright longer than it has
ever been before, this act sets a precedent for indefinite extensions of copyright that
goes against the spirit that it would be for “limited times” as set forth in the U.S.
Constitution, essentially sounding the death knell of the public domain.
. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ), .
. It is worth noting, however, that de Certeau’s analysis is descriptive rather than
prescriptive; there is no call to abandon the imagination of radical change present in
his work, whether implicitly or explicitly.
. McDonough, “No Ghost,” .
Notes 217
. The stars and films used are: Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (), Cameron Diaz
in The Sweetest Thing (), Neve Campbell in Three to Tango (), Reese
Witherspoon in Legally Blonde (), Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes (), Drew
Barrymore in Wishful Thinking (), and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail ().
. The following conversation between Jacks is representative: “Is this you?/I don’t
know what to say/Are all of these you?/Who are you running away from?/
Somebody who might recognize me.../Oh yeah? Who?/I recognize ya!/I know
everything about ya!/That’s not what I asked ya.../I don’t know what to say/Are all
of these you?/Well, I don’t know exactly, uh.../I really don’t know, Doc.” This
transcription is taken from the artist’s script for the piece, which humorously lists
the cast as: “Starring: Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack
Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack
Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack
Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack
Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson and Jack Nicholson.”
Script courtesy of Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York.
. In Mother, one finds Shirley MacLaine’s alcoholic mom in Postcards from the
Edge (), Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon from Stepmom (), Faye
Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (), Meryl Streep from
Kramer vs. Kramer (), and Diane Keaton in The Good Mother (). In
Father, one finds Steve Martin in Father of the Bride (), Tony Danza in She’s
Out of Control (), Harvey Keitel in Imaginary Crimes (), Donald
Sutherland in Ordinary People (), Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer,
and Jon Voight in The Champ ().
. In his essay, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” Kracauer provides an
interesting account of the role of the film critic vis-à-vis the mythologies that
circulate in popular film, one that many of the artists under discussion in this
chapter might well be said to take up: “In order to investigate today’s societies, one
must listen to the confessions of the products of its film industries. They are all
blabbing a rude secret, without really wanting to. In the endless sequence of films, a
limited number of typical themes recur again and again; they reveal how society
wants to see itself. The quintessence of these film themes is at the same time the sum
of the society’s ideologies, whose spell is broken by the interpretation of the
themes.” See: Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in The
Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, ), .
. Candice Breitz, quoted in: Nicholas Chambers, “Candice Breitz: Mother + Father
– Interview with Nicholas Chambers,” Artlines  (): -.
. Ibid., .
. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” .
. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Art, work, and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of
security,” Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy  (MayJune
): .
. On the relation between networked digital media and immaterial labour, see:
Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,”
electronic book review ( June ); available online: http://electronicbookreview.
com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary, accessed  July .
218 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
. See: Yann Moulier Boutang, Le Capitalisme cognitif: la grande transformation (Paris:
Éditions Amsterdam, ). Boutang’s terminology, however, risks sounding as if
this is purely a matter of intellectual labor, eliding the importance of affect and care
to instances of immaterial labor.
. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” .
. Walter Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A.H. Schmitz,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in
Selected Writings, Volume Two, Part One, -, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard
Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, ), .
. In the second version of his “Work of Art” essay, Benjamin notes that “what is lost
in the withering of semblance and the decay of aura in works of art is matched by a
huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum]. This space for play is widest in film”
(). As Miriam Hansen has argued, the notion of play “provides Benjamin with a
term, and concept, that allows him to imagine an alternative mode of aesthetics on a
par with modern, collective experience, an aesthetics that could counteract, at the
level of sense perception, the political consequences of the failed – that is, capitalist
and imperialist, destructive and self-destructive – reception of technology” ().
While this is important to Benjamin’s discussions of children’s toys and gambling, it
is most centrally elaborated with reference to the cinema. See: Walter Benjamin,
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility (Second Version),”
trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Volume , -, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), -; Miriam Hansen, “Roomfor-Play:
Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October  (Summer ): -.
. Iles, .
. See: Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), especially -.
. Pierre Huyghe, quoted in: George Baker, “Interview with Pierre Huyghe,” October
 (Fall ): .
. Bellour, ; emphasis added.
. These included in the widescreen process, VistaVision, which Hitchcock employed
in To Catch A Thief (), Vertigo and North by Northwest (), and
experimenting with -D in Dial “M” for Murder ().
. Laura Mulvey, Death  Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reaktion Books, ), .
. The poster read, “The manager of this theater has been instructed at the risk of his
life, not to admit to the theater any persons after the picture starts. Any spurious
attempts to enter by side doors, fire escapes or ventilating shafts will be met by
force. The entire objective of this extraordinary policy, of course, is to help you enjoy
PSYCHO more. – Alfred Hitchcock” For an account of these release practices and
their implications, see: Linda Williams, “Discipline and Distraction: Psycho, Visual
Culture, and Postmodern Cinema,” in “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines, ed.
John Carlos Rowe (New York: Columbia University Press, ), -.
. Philip Monk, Double Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (Toronto: The
Power Plant and the Art Gallery of York University, ), .
. Some galleries have held special events during which they stay open for twentyfour
hours to show  Hour Psycho in its entirety. For example, the Guggenheim
Notes 219
Museum, New York, exhibited the work in its lobby on - January  as a part of
a twenty-four hour marathon of talks and performances concerning the concept of
time.
. Maria Walsh, “Cinema in the Gallery: Discontinuity and Potential Space in Salla
Tykkä’s Trilogy,” Senses of Cinema  (September-October ); available online:
http://sensesofcinema.com///salla_tykka_trilogy, accessed  July .
. Birnbaum, .
. Douglas Gordon, quoted in: Amy Taubin, “ Hour Psycho,” in Spellbound: Art and
Film, ed. Ian Christie and Philip Dodd (London: BFI Publishing, ), .
. Incidentally, this shot was not included in the theatrical cut of the film but can be
seen on the special features documentary The Making of Psycho on the Psycho:
Collector’s Edition DVD released by Universal.
. Douglas Gordon, quoted in: Hermange, .
. Mulvey, .
. Christy Lange notes that though the work was originally produced using this VCR,
in recent years, the work has been digitized and its slow motion regulated by a
computer. While this is an interesting case of how to preserve and exhibit media
artworks amidst technological change, my analysis considers  Hour Psycho as
an installation using a commercially-available videotape and a VCR since this is
how it was originally exhibited. See: Christy Lange, “Douglas Gordon: Ten Years
Ago Today,” in theanyspacewhatever, ed. Nancy Spector (New York: Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, ), .
. Taubin, -. More than Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, which involves extensive
reediting,  Hour Psycho does find a precedent in Jacobs’ Perfect Film (),
for which the filmmaker found outtakes from a television studio’s reportage after
the Malcolm X assassination, named it Perfect Film, and circulated as a film
without any alteration. A perhaps more relevant film from the American
experimental tradition is Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (), which optically reprints the
entirety of an early phantom ride film of a trolley moving down Market Street in
San Francisco in slow motion.
. In his Deleuzian reading of  Hour Psycho, Mark Hansen does acknowledge the
relationship between  Hour Psycho and the temporal changes brought to
moving images with the advent of video. Hansen writes, “...[A]gain and again,
[Gordon] insists that video time – the time of slow-motion, freeze-framing, and
repetition – is the ‘given time’ of his generation” (). However, Hansen does not
discuss home video in particular and demonstrates a carelessness when dealing
with the specificity of video. First of all, he describes  Hour Psycho as an
example of “digital manipulation of found film footage” (), when in fact Gordon
makes use of neither digital manipulation nor found film, but an analogue
videotape and VCR as source and method manipulation, respectively. Hansen
writes that Gordon “slows down its projection speed to  frames a second (instead
of ),” when video possesses a frame rate of thirty frames per second, rather than
the twenty-four of film (). Lastly (and somewhat inexplicably), he asserts that
the image of  Hour Psycho changes only once every twelve seconds, a statement
that is both untrue and in contradiction with his earlier statement (repeated in an
image caption) that the projection speed is slowed to two frames per second. See:
220 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, ),
-.
. As Frederick Wasser has written, “Porno became a major propellant in the
development of prerecorded cassettes. The VCR easily captured the preexisting
porno audience and added a larger public composed of viewers who would never
think of stepping into an adult movie theater. The concurrence of Betamax and the
new, more plot-driven erotica led to adult titles become the first big genre for
prerecorded cassettes.” See: Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire
and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), -.
. Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright
(Durham: Duke University Press, ), .
. Dominique Païni, Le temps exposé: Le cinéma de la salle au musée (Paris: Cahiers du
cinéma, ), .
. Douglas Gordon, quoted in: Russell Ferguson, “Trust Me,” in Douglas Gordon, ed.
Russell Ferguson (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
. Pascal Bonitzer writes that in the deployment of filmic suspense, “This subjective
stretching, this viscosity of time, is related to eroticism, and it concerns the
eroticized time in the prolonged, necessarily disturbing undecidability of an event.
Suspense is the erotic prolongation of the trajectory of a coin thrown up in the air,
before it falls on one side (tails: yes) or the other (heads: no).” Pascal Bonitzer,
“Hitchcockian Suspense,” trans. Martin Thom, in Everything You’ve Always Wanted
To Know About Lacan... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London:
Verso, ), .
. Ibid., .
. Anthony McCall, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Art,” .
. A.O. Scott, “Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema,” New York Times ( August );
available online: http://www.nytimes.com////movies/scot.html, accessed
 July .
. Mulvey, .
Chapter 4 – The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction
. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia
Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ), .
. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
), .
. Raymond Bellour, “L’Entre-images,” in L’Entre-images: Photo. Cinéma. Video (Paris:
Éditions de la Différence, ), -.
. Omer Fast, quoted in “Whitney Focus” ( May ); available online: http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=TYfIxEfywKM, accessed  July .
. See: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), -.
. Maria Muhle, “Omer Fast: When Images Lie... About the Fictionality of
Documents,” Afterall  (Spring ): .
Notes 221
. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Philip Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton
(New York: Semiotext[e], ), .
. Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), .
. In his introduction to Forget Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer notes the extent to which,
“Simulations became a best-seller of sorts, especially in the art world.” See: Sylvère
Lotringer, “Exterminating Angel: Introduction to Forget Foucault,” in Jean
Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, trans. Philip Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark
Polizzatti (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], ), . For an account of the art world’s
embrace of Baudrillard that argues it rests on a misreading of the author’s work,
see: François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co.
Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ), -.
. Hal Foster, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 
(Spring ): .
. Demos names Anri Sala, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Amar
Kanwar, Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl as
important figures related to this tendency. See: T.J. Demos, “Moving Images of
Globalization,” Grey Room  (Fall ): .
. Rosenbaum cites diverse works by Lumière, Méliès, the Italian neorealists, the
members of the French New Wave, Robert Altman, and Iranian filmmakers of the
s as support for this claim. See: Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Creation of the
World: Roberto Rossellini’s India Matri Bhumi,” in Outsider Films On India, ,
ed. Shanay Jhaveri (Mumbai: The Shoestring Publisher, ), .
. A partial list of such exhibitions and publications includes: Archive Fever: Uses of the
Document in Contemporary Art, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Göttigen; Steidl, ); Being
Singular Plural: Moving Images from India (), curated by Sandhini Poddar at the
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Documenta  (), curated by Okwui Enwezor,
Kassel; Documentary Now: Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film, and the Visual
Arts, ed. Frits Gierstberg (Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, ); Experiments with Truth
() curated by Mark Nash at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia;
Ghosting: The Role of the Archive in Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video, ed. Jane
Connarty and Josephine Lanyon (London: Picture This, ); The Greenroom:
Reconsidering the Document and Contemporary Art #, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl
(Berlin and Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Sternberg Press and Center for Curatorial
Studies, Bard College, ); and Time Zones: Recent Film and Video (), curated
by Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir at Tate Modern, London. While this
“documentary turn” extends beyond uses of the moving image to include still
photography and other media, the vast majority of the work that belongs to this
tendency employs film and video.
. The first generation is comprised of “pioneers” such as Vito Acconci, Nam June
Paik, and Woody Vasulka; the second is made up of “painters and sculptors” such
as Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, and Bill Viola. See: Dominique Païni, Le temps exposé: le
cinéma de la salle au musée (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, ), -; translation mine. It
should be noted that the recent activities of Gordon and Huyghe have not been
limited to the genre of remaking. Gordon’s Zidane: A Twenty-First Century
Portrait (, made in collaboration with Philippe Parreno) and Huyghe’s
222 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Streamside Day Follies () and A Journey That Wasn’t () all fit with
Païni’s “fourth generation,” disrupting somewhat the clean divisions he hopes to
make. It should also be noted that the notion that these “fourth generation”
practices engage in an exploration of temporality is echoed by Daniel Birnbaum’s
Chronology, a text that takes up concepts drawn from phenomenology and Deleuze’s
writings on cinema in order to grapple with the relationship between time and
subjectivity found in moving image works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and others. See: Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New
York: Lukas and Sternberg, ).
. Ibid., .
. Julien constitutes an interesting case, given that his background was firmly
anchored in film production for many years before moving into the gallery. Many
filmmakers have produced works for an installation context, but they are
sometimes one-offs (Godard) or other times in a derivative relation to work made
for theatrical exhibition (Akerman). Julien, by contrast, has fully entered the world
of video installation, currently making work in this format much more often than
for theatrical distribution.
. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT
Press, ), -.
. Ibid., .
. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ), .
. Jacques Aumont, et al., Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert (Austin: University
of Texas Press, ), .
. Ibid.
. This “impression of reality,” a major preoccupation of s film theory, is created
as much or more by an organization of filmic space and techniques of spectatorial
identification than with any link to the profilmic real. This allows a film like Avatar
() to produce a profound impression of reality – akin to the willing suspension
of disbelief – while asserting a notable distance from the profilmic. For a canonical
discussion of some of the questions surrounding this issue, see: Christian Metz, “On
the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema,
trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), -.
. This eruption of the documentary value of the image might be described as a
moment when presentation punctures the fabric of representation. Jean Renoir’s Rules
of the Game (La Règle du jeu, ) evinces such a moment in the hunting
sequence when a rabbit is killed. As Vivian Sobchack has put it, the spectator knows
“that the murder of the young aviator André Jurieu is merely represented, whereas
the rabbit’s death is not only represented but also presented... [Jurieu’s] death is not
merely contained by the codes governing the narrative but is, in fact, constituted
and determined by them. The rabbit’s death, however, exceeds the narrative codes
that communicate it. It ruptures and interrogates the boundaries (and license) of
fictional representation and has a ‘ferocious reality’ that the character’s death does
not.” See: Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ), -.
. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Continuum, ), .
Notes 223
. Paul Willemen, “An Avant-Garde for the ‘s,” in Looks and Frictions: Essays in
Cultural Studies and Film Theory (London: British Film Institute, ), .
. Okwui Enwezor, “Documentary/Verité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure
of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” in The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary
and Contemporary Art #, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (Berlin and Annandale-onHudson:
Sternberg Press and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, ), .
. Willemen, .
. Ibid., .
. Emre Baykal, Kutlug Ataman: You Tell Me About Yourself Anyway!, trans. Nazim
Dikbas (Istanbul and Cologne: Yapi Kredi Publications and Buchhandlung Walther
König, ), .
. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., ),
.
. Also in , Roland Barthes wrote, “The contemporary problem is not to destroy
narrative but to subvert it; today’s task is to dissociate subversion from
destruction.” See: Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image Music Text,
trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .
. Laura Mulvey, “Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative, and Historical Experience,”
in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ),
.
. Ibid., .
. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, quoted in: Samantha Ellis, “Eija-Liisa Ahtila,” Make  (): .
. Alison Butler, “Feminist Film in the Gallery: If  Was ,” Camera Obscura , no.  
(): .
. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, quoted in: Magdalena Malm, “The Idea of Linearity Bothers Me,
An Interview with Eija-Liisa Ahtila,  October ,” in Black Box Illuminated, ed.
Sara Arrhenius, Magdalena Malm, and Cristina Ricupero (Stockholm: Propexus,
), .
. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
. Ibid., ; emphasis in text.
. See: Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).
. Baudrillard, Simulations, -.
. This element is without a doubt at play. In , Pamela Lee wrote that, “For close
to ten years now, that ambient phenomenon known as the art world has been hit by
what amounts to an identity crisis, more often than not figured under the sign of
globalization. Flip through the catalogues and magazines, survey the principal
actors and bit players, track the ever-proliferating biennials – from Sao Paulo to
Shanghai to Istanbul – and witness the art world's struggle to rethink its audiences
and range of influence, its norms and procedures.” This, of course, is a welcome
change from a conception of the art world and of art history as thoroughly Western
and located in a handful of American and European cities. However, as Lee
suggests, “something of a colonial logic underwrites the expansion of the art
world's traditional borders, as if the art world itself were gleefully following
globalization’s imperial mandate.” Art can provide a critical space to reflect upon
the processes of globalization, but it also is a realm that can sometimes mirror its
224 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
quest for new markets and new subjects, with difference and exoticism as
commodities to be brought to market. The current fixation on documentary
participates in not just the first of these functions, but both indeed. See: Pamela Lee,
“Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalism,” Artforum
(November ): -.
. Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary” in Theorizing Documentary, ed.
Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, ), .
. Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in
Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ernst Bloch (London: Verso, ), -.
. Ibid.
. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz,
trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ; emphasis in
text.
. Kanwar published a short article about this visit, entitled “Gandhi and the
General.” In this article, Kanwar also discusses the histories informing two other
segments of The Torn First Pages, Ma Win Maw Oo () and Thet Win Aung
(). See: Amar Kanwar, “Gandhi and the General,” Himal Southasian (February
); available online: http://himalmag.com/component/content/article/-gandhi-and-the-general.html,
accessed  July .
. Mahatma Gandhi, “On the Verge of It,” in Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political
Writings, ed. Dennis Dalton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., ),
.
. Michael Renov, “Away from Copying: The Art of Documentary Practice,” in Truth or
Dare: Art and Documentary, ed. Gail Pearce and Cahal McLaughlin (Bristol: Intellect
Books, ), .
. See: Édouard Glissant, “Transparency and Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans.
Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), -.
. In her work on the category of the pretty, Rosalind Galt has shown that the notion
that “the visually attractive image can only work against true radicality” is “a mode
of thought that is all too common in film theory” and that “in one form or another,
runs through the history of writing on film, intertwining an often implicit aesthetic
judgment with a usually explicit political critique.” See: Rosalind Galt, “Pretty: Film
Theory, Aesthetics, and the History of the Troublesome Image,” Camera Obscura ,
no.   (): -.
. Omer Fast, quoted in: Henriette Huldisch, “Three Sides to Every Story: The Art of
Omer Fast,” Omer Fast: Nostalgia exhibition flyer (New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art, ): np.
. In the credits of Sans soleil, Marker acknowledges Danièle Tessier for this footage,
but its precise source and location are not specified.
. Sobchack, .
. Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” in Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul
Douglas Grant (New York: Berg, ), ; emphasis in text.
. Hito Steyerl, “Can Witnesses Speak? On the Philosophy of the Interview,” in
Afirmar la Realidad?/To Affirm Reality? Simposio Injerto, ed. Eduardo Thomas (Mexico
City: Ambulante Film Festival, ), .
. Anne Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 
(Winter ): .
Notes 225
. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, ), .
Conclusion – “Cinema and...”
. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso, ), .
. Jacques Rancière, “Le cinéma dans la ‘fin’ de l’art,” Cahiers du cinéma  (December
): ; translation mine.
. For an explanation of this concept, see: Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
trans. Josué V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
Pantheon Books, ), -, especially -.
. Raymond Bellour, “Cinema and...” Semiotica -/ (): .
. Cinema studies is not alone in its identity crisis. In an article on the state of the
discipline, Dudley Andrew notes that, “Art history may sense itself in a parallel
situation as objets d’art now share attention with innumerable phenomena
comprising the strategically undefined zone of visual culture.” See: Dudley
Andrew, “The Core and Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry  (Summer ):
.
226 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, .
—. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
—. “Reconciliation Under Duress.” Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Aesthetics and
Politics, edited by Ernst Bloch, -. London: Verso, .
Aitken, Doug. Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. New York: Distributed
Art Publishers, .
Andrew, Dudley. “The Core and Flow of Film Studies.” Critical Inquiry  (Summer
): -.
Arns, Inke, and Gabriele Horn, eds. History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Reenactment in
Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance. Frankfurt: Revolver, .
“Art History and the ‘Blockbuster’ Exhibition.” Art Bulletin  (September ): -
.
Aumont, Jacques, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie, and Marc Vernet. Aesthetics of Film.
Translated by Richard Neupert. Austin: University of Texas Press, .
Baker, George. “Interview with Pierre Huyghe.” October  (Fall ): -.
Balsom, Erika. “Dial ‘M’ for Museum: The Hitchcock of Contemporary Art.” Hitchcock
Annual  (): -.
Barnes, Brooks. “Audiences Laughed to Forget Troubles.” New York Times,  December
. Accessed  July . http://www.nytimes.com////movies/yearend.
html.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, .
—. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, .
—. The Neutral. Translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia
University Press, .
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.” Translated by
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. October  (Spring ): -.
—. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, .
—. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Berg,
.
—. Simulations. Translated by Philip Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton. New York:
Semiotext[e], .
—. The Vital Illusion. Edited by Julia Witwer. New York: Columbia University Press, .
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression
of Reality in Cinema.” Translated by Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst. In Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, -. New York:
Columbia University Press, .
—. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Translated by Alan
Williams. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip
Rosen, -. New York: Columbia University Press, .
Baykal, Emre. Kutluğ Ataman: You Tell Me About Yourself Anyway! Translated by Nazim
Dikbas. Istanbul and Cologne: Yapi Kredi Publications and Buchhandlung Walther
König, .
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Volume One. Translated by Hugh Grey. Berkeley: University
of California Press, .
Bellour, Raymond. “Battle of the Images.” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after
Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, -. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
—. “Cinema and...” Semiotica -/ (): -.
—. “Le Corps de la fiction.” Trafic  (Summer ): -.
—. L'Entre-images: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo. Paris: La Différence, .
—. “The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead).” Translated by George Baker. In James
Coleman, edited by George Baker, -. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
—. “Of an Other Cinema.” In Black Box Illuminated, edited by Sara Arrhenius, Magdalena
Malm, and Cristina Ricupero, -. Stockholm: Propexus, .
—. “Saving the Image.” In Saving the Image: Art after Film, edited by Tanya Leighton and
Pavel Büchler, -. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, .
Bellour, Raymond, Catherine David, and Christine van Assche, eds. Passages de l’image.
Barcelona: Centre Cultural de la Fundacio Caixa de Pensions, .
Belton, John. “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution.” October  (Spring ): -.
Benjamin, Walter. Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, .
—. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, .
—. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, .
—. Selected Writings, Volume Four: -. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, .
—. Selected Writings, Volume Three: -. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, .
—. Selected Writings, Volume Two, Part One: -. Edited by Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, .
—. Selected Writings, Volume Two, Part Two: -. Edited by Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, .
Birnbaum, Daniel. Chronology. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, .
Blom, Ina. “Director’s Cut (Beauty Operations).” In De Rijke/De Rooij: Director’s Cut, edited
by Ina Blom, -. Oslo: The National Museum of Contemporary Art/Museet for
Samtidskunst, .
Bois, Yve-Alain, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss. Art Since :
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Volume ,  to the Present. New York:
Thames and Hudson, .
Bolter, David Jay, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge:
MIT Press, .
228 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Bonitzer, Pascal. “Hitchcockian Suspense.” Translated by Martin Thom. In Everything
You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Jacques Lacan...But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock,
edited by Slavoj Žižek, -. London: Verso, .
Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley:
University of California Press, .
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to . New York: Columbia University Press, .
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the World.
Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Lukas and Sternberg, .
—. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: les
presses du réel, .
Boutang, Yann Moulier. Le Capitalisme cognitif: la grande transformation. Paris: Éditions
Amsterdam, .
Boym, Svetlana. “Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia.” Cabinet  (Winter -): -.
Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press,
.
—. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso, .
Buergel, Roger M. “Arbeiten an den Grenzen des Realen,” Texte zur Kunst , no.  (September
): -.
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, .
Butler, Alison. “Feminist Film in the Gallery: If  Was .” Camera Obscura , no.  
(): -.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, .
Cameron, Dan. “The Hassle in Kassel.” Artforum (September ): -.
Casetti, Francesco. “The Filmic Experience: An Introduction.” (March ). Accessed
July , . http://www.francescocasetti.net/saggi/FilmicExperience.pdf.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, .
Chambers, Nicholas. “Candice Breitz: Mother + Father – Interview with Nicholas Chambers.”
Artlines  (): -.
Chang, Helen. “Sátántangó.” Frieze  (September ): .
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber
Optics. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Clark, T.J. The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. New Haven: Yale University
Press, .
Connolly, Maeve. The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site, and Screen. London: Intellect,
.
Cornwell, Regina. “Gary Hill: Interview.” Art Monthly  (October ): -.
Crimp, Douglas. On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Csaszar, Tom. “The Spectacular, Record-Breaking, Sold-Out, Smash-Hit Blockbuster
Supershow!: A Phenomenon of Museum Culture.” New Art Examiner  (DecemberJanuary
-), -.
Cullinan, Nicholas, ed. Tacita Dean: FILM. London: Tate Publishing, .
Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the
Intellectual Life of the United States. Translated by Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, .
Bibliography 229
Daney, Serge. “Journal de l’an passé.” Trafic  (Winter ): -
—. Postcards from the Cinema. Translated by Paul Douglas Grant. New York: Berg, .
—. La Rampe: Cahier critique, -. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, .
Danto, Arthur. Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. Berkeley:
University of California Press, .
Davila, Thierry. “Inventing Consciousness.” Translated by C. Penwarden, Art Press 
(September ): -.
Dean, Tacita. “Artist Questionnaire:  Responses.” October  (Spring ): -.
—. “Fernsehturm: Backwards into the Future.” In Tacita Dean: Seven Books – Selected Writings,
np. Paris: Éditions des Musées de la Ville de Paris and Steidl Publishers, .
—. “The Green Ray.” In Tacita Dean: Film Works, edited by Rina Caravajal, -. Milan:
Edizioni Charta, .
—. “Palast.” In Tacita Dean: Film Works, edited by Rina Caravajal, -. Milan: Edizioni
Charta, .
—. “Historical Fiction.” Artforum (March ): -.
—. “Save Celluloid, For Art’s Sake,” The Guardian,  February . Accessed  July
. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign//feb//tacita-dean-mm-film.
De Baecque, Antoine. “L’‘expo Godard,’ compromissions impossibles.” Libération (
July ). Accessed  July . http://www.liberation.fr/cahier-special/-l-
expo-godard-compromissions-impossibles.
—. “Passages de l’image: Iconoclastes, iconolâtres.” Cahiers du cinéma  (September
): -.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley:
University of California Press, .
Debord, Guy. Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents. Translated
and edited by Ken Knabb. Oakland: AK Press, .
—. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone
Books, .
Decherney, Peter. Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet. New York: Columbia
University Press, .
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October  (Winter ): -.
Demos, T.J. “Moving Images of Globalization.” Grey Room  (Fall ): -.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, .
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated
by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over.” In The End of Cinema
as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, edited by Jon Lewis, -. New York:
New York University Press, .
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .
—. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” differences: a journal of feminist
and cultural studies , no.  (): -.
Dodd, Philip. “Modern Stories.” In Spellbound: Art and Film, edited by Ian Christie and
Philip Dodd, -. London: Hayward Gallery and British Film Institute, .
230 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
“Does the Museum Fail? Podium Discussion at the rd International Short Film Festival
Oberhausen.” In Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’ Cinema, edited by Mike Sperlinger
and Ian White, -. Cologne: Verlag der Büchhandlung Walther König, .
Eakin, Emily. “Celluloid Hero,” The New Yorker,  October . Accessed  July .
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting////fa_fact_eakin?currentPa-
ge=all.
Editorial Notes. “The Meaning of Decay in Art.” Translated by John Shepley. In Guy
Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough,
-. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Eleey, Peter. “The Exploded Drive-In.” In Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers, edited by Emily Hall,
-. New York: Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time, .
Ellis, Samantha. “Eija-Liisa Ahtila.” Make  (): -.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Casting Around: Hitchcock’s Absence. In Johan Grimonprez: Looking
for Alfred, edited by Stephen Bode, -. Ostfildern and London: Hatje Cantz and
Film and Video Umbrella, .
—. “Early Film History and Multi-Media: An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” In Old
Media, New Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Chun and Thomas
Keenan, -. London: Routledge, .
—. “Peter Greenaway.” In Spellbound: Art and Film, edited by Ian Christie and Philip
Dodd, -. London: Hayward Gallery, .
Enwezor, Okwui. “Documentary/Verité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of
‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art.” In The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and
Contemporary Art #, edited by Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, -. Berlin and Annandale-on-Hudson:
Sternberg Press and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College,
.
Ferguson, Russell. “Trust Me.” In Douglas Gordon, edited by Russell Ferguson, -.
Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle: Bay Press, .
—. The Return of the Real. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New
Press, .
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon
Books, .
—. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, -, edited by Colin
Gordon. New York: Pantheon, .
Fowler, Catherine. “Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time from Maya
Deren to Eija-Liisa Ahtila.” Screen , no.  (): -.
Frampton, Hollis. Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, and Video Texts, -.
Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, .
Frey, Mattias. “No(ir) Place to Go: Spatial Anxiety and Sartorial Intertextuality in Die
Unberührbare.” Cinema Journal , no.  (Summer ): -.
Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, .
Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT Press,
.
—. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press,
.
Bibliography 231
Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT
Press, .
Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, .
Galloway, David. “Documenta : The Bottom Line.” Art in America , no.  (September
): -.
Galt, Rosalind. “Pretty: Film Theory, Aesthetics, and the History of the Troublesome Image.”
Camera Obscura , no.   (): -.
Gandhi, Mahatma. Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings, edited by Dennis Dalton.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., .
Gidal, Peter. Blow Job. London: Afterall Books, .
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, .
Godard, Jean-Luc. “From Critic to Filmmaker: Godard in Interview (extracts).” Translated
by Tom Milne. In Cahiers du cinéma, the s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating
Hollywood, edited by Jim Hillier, -. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .
—. Godard on Godard. Edited and translated by Tom Milne. New York: The Viking Press,
.
Godfrey, Mark. “The Artist as Historian.” October  (Spring ): -.
—. “Pierre Huyghe’s Double Spectacle.” Grey Room  (Summer ): -.
Gordon, Douglas. “...an apology as a short story/a short story as an apology.” In Douglas
Gordon: Kidnapping, -. Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, .
Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, .
—. The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume Four, Modernism with a Vengeance, -.
Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .
Guillaume, Morel. “L’actualité vue par Philippe-Alain Michaud, conservateur au Musée
nationale d’art moderne.” Le Journal des Arts  ( April ). Accessed  July .
http://www.artclair.com/jda/archives/e-docs////E/document_entretien.php.
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator.”
In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, edited by Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen, -. Oxford: Oxford University Press, .
—. “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality.” differences: a
journal of feminist and cultural studies , no.  (): -.
Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, .
—. “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical Inquiry  (Winter ): -.
—. “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema.” October  (Summer ): -.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .
Harmon, Amy. “Black Hawk Download: Moving Beyond Music, Pirates Use New Tools
to Turn the Net into an Illicit Video Club.” New York Times,  January . Accessed
 July . http://www.nytimes.com////technology/black-hawk-download-
moving-beyond-music-pirates-use-new-tools-turn-net-into.html.
Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by
William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, .
232 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Hermange, Emmanuel. “‘Pour nous, le cinéma est mort’: Notes sur quelques stratégies
cinéphiles de l’art.” Parachute  (July-September ): -.
Hilderbrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Durham:
Duke University Press, .
Horrigan, Bill. “Five Years Later.” In Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, edited by
Tanya Leighton, -. London: Tate Publishing and Afterall Books, .
Horwath, Alexander. “Second Lives – The Documenta  Film Programme.” Accessed 
May . http://www.documenta.de/.html?&L=.
Huldisch, Henriette. “Three Sides to Every Story: The Art of Omer Fast.” Omer Fast: Nostalgia
exhibition flyer, np. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, .
Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room  (Spring ): -.
Iles, Chrissie. “Issues in the New Cinematic Aesthetic in Video.” In Saving the Image: Art
after Film, edited by Pavel Büchler and Tanya Leighton, -. Glasgow: Centre for
Contemporary Arts, .
Iles, Chrissie, ed. Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, -. New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art Books, .
Iles, Chrissie, and Henriette Huldisch. “Keeping Time: On Collecting Film and Video Art
in the Museum.” In Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, edited by Bruce
Altshuler, -. Princeton: Princeton University Press, .
J. Paul Getty Trust. “Artist Tacita Dean to Visit Getty to Discuss UNESCO Proposal to
Recognize Film as World Cultural Heritage,”  April . Accessed  July .
http://news.getty.edu/article_display.cfm?article_id=.
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, .
—. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern
Culture, edited by Hal Foster, -. New York: The New Press, .
—. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press,
.
—. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, .
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, .
Judd, Donald. Donald Judd: Complete Writings -. Halifax: The Press of the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design.
Kanwar, Amar. “Gandhi and the General.” Himal Southasian (February ). Accessed
July , . http://himalmag.com/component/content/article/-gandhi-and-the-
general.html.
Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, Or the Wind in the Trees. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, .
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Space and Time: -. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, .
Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke University
Press, .
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, .
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated and edited by Thomas
Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .
Krauss, Rosalind. “...And Then Turn Away? An Essay on James Coleman.” In James Coleman,
edited by George Baker, -. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Bibliography 233
—. “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.” October  (Fall ): -.
—. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press,
.
—. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry , no.  (Winter ): -.
—. “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph.” In James Coleman, edited by
George Baker, -. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
—. “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection. October  (Spring ): -
.
—. “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition.” October  (Spring ): -.
—. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London:
Thames and Hudson, .
Lange, Christy. “Douglas Gordon: Ten Years Ago Today.” In theanyspacewhatever, edited
by Nancy Spector, -. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, .
Lazzarato, Maurizzio. “Art, work, and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of
security.” Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy  (May-June
): -.
—. “Immaterial Labor.” Translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emery. In Radical Thought in
Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, -. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, .
Lee, Felicia R. “An Artist Releases a New Film After Paramount Blocks His First.” New
York Times,  July . Accessed  July . http://www.nytimes.com////
movies/film.html.
Lee, Pamela M. “Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalism.” Artforum
(November ): -.
—. “Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij: A Portfolio.” Artforum (March ): -.
Leighton, Tanya. “Introduction.” In Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, edited by
Tanya Leighton, -. London: Tate Publishing and Afterall Books, .
Le Mouvement des images. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, .
Lequeux, Emmanuelle. “La Vie rêvée des images.” Beaux Arts Magazine  (May ):
-.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down
Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, .
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated
by Ellen Frothingham. New York: Noonday Press, .
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke
Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, .
Lind, Maria, and Hito Steyerl. “Introduction: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary
Art.” In The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art
#, edited by Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, -. Berlin and Annandale-on-Hudson:
Sternberg Press and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, .
Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: The Modern Library, .
London, Barbara, ed. Video Spaces: Eight Installations. New York: Museum of Modern Art
and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., .
Lotringer, Sylvère. “Exterminating Angel: Introduction to Forget Foucault,” in Jean
Baudrillard, Forget Foucault. Translated by Philip Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark
Polizzatti. -. Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], .
234 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. London: Routledge,
.
Lubin, David M. “Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales.” Artforum (November ): .
Lütticken, Sven. Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers,
.
Lütticken, Sven, ed. Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art. Rotterdam:
Witte de With, .
MacDonald, Scott. “mm: Reports of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated; In Focus: The
Death of mm?” Cinema Journal , no.  (Spring ): -.
MacDonald, Scott, and Matthias Müller. “A Conversation.” In The Memo Book: The Films
and Videos of Matthias Müller, edited by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, -. Berlin: Verlag
Vorwerk , .
Malm, Magdalena. “The Idea of Linearity Bothers Me, An Interview with Eija-Liisa Ahtila,
 October .” In Black Box Illuminated, edited by Sara Arrhenius, Magdalena
Malm, and Cristina Ricupero, -. Stockholm: Propexus, .
Mangini, Elizabeth. “Pipilotti’s Pickle: Making Meaning from the Feminine Position.”
PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art , no.  (May ): -.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes.
London, Penguin, .
McDonough, Tom. “No Ghost.” October  (Fall ): -.
Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, -. New York:
Macmillan, .
Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .
—. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, .
Miller, Lia. “‘Darjeeling’ to be Paired with a Short.” New York Times,  October .
Accessed  July . http://www.nytimes.com////business/media/darjeel-
ing.html.
Mishkin, Sarah. “Alumnus denies allegations of copyright infringement.” Yale Daily
News,  June . Accessed  July . http://www.yaledailynews.com/news//
jun//alumnus-denies-allegations-of-copyright/.
Mondloch, Kate. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, .
Monk, Philip. Double Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon. Toronto: The Power
Plant and the Art Gallery of York University, .
Morgan, Jessica. “Time after Time.” In Time Zones: Recent Film and Video, edited by Jessica
Morgan and Gregor Muir, -. Tate: London, .
Mourlet, Michel. “Sur un art ignoré.” Cahiers du cinéma  (August ): -.
“Movie Kodak Made for Individual Users.” New York Times,  January : .
Muhle, Maria. “Omer Fast: When Images Lie... About the Fictionality of Documents.”
Afterall  (Spring ): -.
Müller, Vanessa Joan. “Forever and a Day.” In Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij: After the
Hunt, edited by Veit Loers, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Caroline Schneider, -. New
York: Lukas and Sternberg, .
Bibliography 235
Mulvey, Laura. Death  Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion,
.
—. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
—. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory
Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, -. New York: Columbia University Press,
.
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Multiplex: Directions in Art,  to Now.  November
- July . Accessed  July . http://www.moma.org/collection/brow-
se_results.php?criteria=O%AAD%AE%A&page_number=&templa-
te_id=&sort_order=.
Museum of Modern Art, and Creative Time. “MoMA and Creative Time Present Doug
Aitken: Sleepwalkers. Large-Scale Cinematic Installation to Be Projected onto the
Façades of The Museum of Modern Art, Rhythms and Energies of New York and Its
Inhabitants Inspire Major Public Artwork.”  January . Accessed  July .
http://press.moma.org/wp-content/press-archives/PRESS_RELEASE_ARCHIVE/Ait-
kenpressrelease.pdf.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: McGraw-Hill International, Inc, .
Newman, Michael. “Medium and Event in the Work of Tacita Dean.” In Tacita Dean:
Recent Films and Other Works, -. London: Tate, .
—. “Sauvetage,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books – Essays, np. Paris: Éditions des Musées de la
Ville de Paris and Steidl Publishers, .
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
—. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, .
O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University
of California Press, .
Oser, Alan S. “Perspectives: Great White Way; Planning for a Brighter Times Square.”
New York Times,  December . Accessed  July . http://www.nytimes.com/
///realestate/perspectives-great-white-way-planning-for-a-brighter-times-sq.
html.
Païni, Dominique. “According to JLG...” Translated by Michael Witt. Rouge  (). Accessed
July , . www.rouge.com.au//according_jlg.html.
—. Le Temps exposé: Le cinéma de la salle au museé. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, .
—. “Rapprochements, constellations, resemblances, construction.” In Hitchcock et l’art:
coïncidences fatales, edited by Guy Cogeval and Dominique Païni, -. Milan: Edizioni
Gabriele Mazzotta, .
Pantenburg, Volker. “ and Beyond: Experimental Cinema and Installation Art.” In
Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, edited by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg,
and Simon Rothöhler, -. Vienna: Synema/Filmmuseum Wien, .
—. “‘Post-Cinema?’ Movies, Museums, Mutations.” SITE Magazine  (), -.
Piguet, Philippe. “Documenta IX: état des lieux.” L’Oeil  (September ): -.
Politi, Giancarlo. “A Documenta to Reflect On.” Flash Art International , no.  (October
): , , .
Pourvali, Bamchade. Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, -: à la recherche d’un
théorème perdu exhibition pamphlet. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, .
Prince, Stephen. “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images and Film Theory.” Film
Quarterly , no.  (Spring ): -.
236 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Putnam, James. Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. New York: Thames and Hudson,
.
Quandt, James. “Double Exposure.” Artforum (September ): -, .
Rancière, Jacques. “Le cinéma dans le ‘fin’ de l’art.” Cahiers du cinéma  (December
): -.
—. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, .
—. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, .
Renov, Michael. “Away from Copying: The Art of Documentary Practice.” In Truth or
Dare: Art and Documentary, edited by Gail Pearce and Cahal McLaughlin, -. Bristol:
Intellect Books, .
—. “Toward a Poetics of Documentary.” In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael
Renov, -. New York: Routledge, .
Rice, Shelley. “Three Shows on Time and Movement,” Aperture  (Spring ): -.
Rodowick, D.N. The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary
Film Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
—. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .
Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, .
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “The Creation of the World: Roberto Rossellini’s India Matri Bhumi.”
In Outsider Films On India, -, edited by Shanay Jhaveri, -. Mumbai:
The Shoestring Publisher, .
Rosenberg, Karen. “Tiptoe by the Tulips (or Stretch by the Apples).” New York Times, 
November . Accessed  July . http://www.nytimes.com////arts/de-
sign/rist.html.
“Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art.” October  (Spring ):
-.
“Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film.” October  (Spring
): -.
Royoux, Jean-Christophe. “Remaking Cinema.” In Cinéma, Cinéma: Contemporary Art and
the Cinematic Experience, edited by Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond, -.
Rotterdam: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and NAi Publishers, .
Sadoul, Georges. Histoire générale du cinéma: Tome , L’Invention du cinéma, -.
Paris: Denoël, .
Saltz, Jerry. “MoMA’s Sex Change.” New York Magazine,  December . Accessed 
July . http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews//.
Schafhausen, Nicolaus. “Interview with de Rijke/de Rooij: If Only All Rooms Would So
Clearly Fulfill Their Purpose,” In Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij: After the Hunt, edited
by Veit Loers, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Caroline Schneider, -. New York: Lukas
and Sternberg, .
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
Late Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Scott, A.O. “Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema.” New York Times,  August . Accessed
 July . http://www.nytimes.com////movies/scot.html.
Searle, Adrian. “Talking Heads: Küba by Kutluğ Ataman, Sorting Office, New Oxford
Street, London.” The Guardian,  March . Accessed  July . http://www.
guardian.co.uk/culture//mar//.
Bibliography 237
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, .
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, -, Third Edition. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, .
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University
of California Press, .
Spears, Dorothy. “Pipilotti Rist: MOMA.” Art in America , no.  (January ): .
“Special Section: Museum Blockbuster.” Art in America  (June ): -.
Spector, Nancy, ed. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. New York: Guggenheim Museum
Publications, .
Steinberg, Leo. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, .
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.
Durham: Duke University Press, .
Steyerl, Hito. “Can Witnesses Speak? On the Philosophy of the Interview.” In Afirmar la
Realidad?/To Affirm Reality? Simposio Injerto, edited by Eduardo Thomas, -. Mexico
City: Ambulante Film Festival, .
Taubin, Amy. “ Hour Psycho.” In Spellbound: Art and Film, edited by Ian Christie and
Philip Dodd, -. London: BFI Publishing, .
Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” electronic
book review,  June . Accessed  July . http://electronicbookreview.com/
thread/technocapitalism/voluntary.
Testa, Bart. Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario,
.
Thater, Diana. “Interview: Diana Thater in conversation with Stan Douglas.” In Stan
Douglas, -. London: Phaidon, .
Trodd, Tamara. “Film at the End of the Twentieth Century: Obsolescence and the Medium
in the Work of Tacita Dean.” Object  (-): -.
—. “Lack of Fit: Tacita Dean, Modernism, and the Sculptural Film.” Art History , no. 
(June ): -.
Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark
Age. London: British Film Institute, .
Virilio, Paul. “The Visual Crash.” Translated by Bernard G. Prusak. In CTRL [space]:
Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula
Frohne, and Peter Wiebel, -. Cambridge: MIT Press, .
Wagner, Anne. “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence.” October  (Winter
): -.
Walley, Jonathan. “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde.” In Art and the Moving
Image: A Critical Reader, edited by Tanya Leighton, -. London: Tate Publishing
and Afterall Books, .
Walsh, Maria. “Cinema in the Gallery: Discontinuity and Potential Space in Salla Tykkä’s
Trilogy.” Senses of Cinema  (September-October ): Accessed  July . http://
sensesofcinema.com///salla_tykka_trilogy.
—. “The Light Fantastic: Angela Bulloch Interviewed by Maria Walsh.” Art Monthly 
(December-January -): -.
Wasser, Frederick. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin: University
of Texas Press, .
238 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Wasson, Haidee. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema.
Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Wees, William C. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York:
Anthology Film Archives, .
“Whitney Focus” ( May ). Accessed  July . http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=TYfIxEfywKM.
Willemen, Paul. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, .
Williams, Linda. “Discipline and Distraction: Psycho, Visual Culture, and Postmodern
Cinema.” In “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines, edited by John Carlos Rowe,
-. New York: Columbia University Press, .
—. “Introduction.” In Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, .
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, .
Wollen, Peter. Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film. London: Verso, .
Young, Paul. “Black Box White Cube.” Art and Auction (February ). Accessed  July
. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story//black-box-white-cube/.
Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc., .
Bibliography 239
Illustration Credits
Introduction
p.  Stan Douglas, Overture (). Still from a black-and-white mm film
with looping device and mono optical soundtrack. Overall dimensions vary
with each installation. Edition of two. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.
Chapter 1
p.  Installation view of Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales at Musée des
beaux-arts de Montréal ( November - March ). Photo: Brian
Merrett, courtesy of Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.
p.  Gary Hill, Between Cinema and a Hard Place (). © Gary Hill. Courtesy of
the artist.
p.  Bill Viola, The Arc of Ascent (). Video/sound installation,  x . x .
metres. Three channels of black-and-white video, computer synchronized to
form a composite single image, projected on a . x . metre hanging
translucent scrim in a large dark room; amplified stereo sound. Edition of two
with one artist’s proof. Photo: Kira Perov, courtesy of Bill Viola Studio.
p.  Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz – An Exhibition. Installation view at KW
Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin ( March- May ). Photo: Uwe
Walter, courtesy of K-W Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
p.  Le Mouvement des images. Installation view at Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, level  ( April - January ). Photo: Centre Georges Pompidou,
MNAM-CCI/ Georges Meguerditchian, courtesy of the Centre Georges
Pompidou.
p.  Jean-Luc Godard, Voyage(s) en utopie, JLG, –, à la recherche d’un
théorème perdu. Installation view at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris ( May-
August ). Photo: Michael Witt, courtesy of Michael Witt with thanks to the
Centre Georges Pompidou and Adrian Martin.
p.  Kutluğ Ataman, Kuba (). Installation view at the Sorting Office, New
Oxford Street, London (March-June ). Courtesy of the artist, Artangel and
Thomas Dane Gallery.
p.  Doug Aitken, Sleepwalkers (). Installation view at Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Six-channel video installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of
 Gallery, New York.
p.  Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out ( Cubic Meters) (). Installation
view at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Multichannel video (color, sound),
projector enclosures, circular seating element, carpet. Commissioned through
the generosity of UBS, the Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in
Contemporary Art, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, Maja Oeri and Hans
Bodenmann, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Franz Wassmer, Monique
Barbier-Mueller and by Pro Helvetia, Arts Council of Switzerland. ©  The
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Thomas Griesel, courtesy of the
artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth.
Chapter 2
p.  Tacita Dean, The Green Ray (). Still from a mm colour film, silent,
:. Edition of . Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
and Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London.
p.  Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, Untitled (). Still from a mm
color film, silent, :. Edition of . © Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij.
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
p.  Simon Starling, Wilhelm Noack oHG (). Installation view at
neugerriemschneider, Berlin, . Photo: Jens Ziehe, courtesy the artist,
neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Casey Kaplan, New York.
p.  Matthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story (). Still from a
continuous color mm film projection installation with sound, cloth, steel
cable, :, dimensions variable. © Matthew Buckingham, courtesy of Murray
Guy, New York.
242 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
p.  Matthew Buckingham, False Future (). Still from a continuous blackand-white
mm film projection with sound, :, dimensions variable. ©
Matthew Buckingham, courtesy of Murray Guy, New York.
p.  Tacita Dean, Palast (). Still from a mm colour film, silent, :.
Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and Frith
Street Gallery, London.
Chapter 3
p.  Chris Moukarbel, World Trade Center  (). Still from a singlechannel
video projection. Courtesy of the artist.
p.  Brice Dellsperger, body double  (). Still from one channel of a channel
looped video installation, : each, DV to BetacamSP. Courtesy of the
artist and Air de Paris.
p.  Angela Bulloch, Z Point (). Installation view at Kunsthaus Glarus,
Glarus ( September- November ).  plastic pixel modules (wall of  x 
modules). Plastic, printed aluminium panel, white glass, diffusion foil, cables,
RGB lighting system, DMX Controller. Sound system: amplifier, mixer,
loudspeakers, cables. Programmed sequence : on loop. German-language
version Serial numbers: -/DMX - -/DMX.  x  x  cm, each
 x  x  cm, (AB ). Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
p.  Candice Breitz, Becoming Drew (). Stills from the series Becoming
(). Dual-channel installation, :. Edition of  + A.P. Courtesy of the artist.
p.  Candice Breitz, Her (-). Installation view at Kunsthalle Berlin.
Seven-Channel installation, :. Edition of  + A.P. Photo: Jens Ziehe, courtesy
of the artist.
p.  Douglas Gordon,  Hour Psycho (). Installation view at Le Méjan,
Arles (). Single screen video installation, dimensions variable. © 
Studio lost but found / Douglas Gordon / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Studio
lost but found (Bert Ross), courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. From Psycho (),
USA. Directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. Distributed by Paramount
Pictures © Universal City Studios, Inc.
Illustration Credits 243
Chapter 4
p.  Omer Fast, The Casting (). Installation view of a four-channel video,
sound, :, mm transferred to video. Commissioned by Museum moderner
Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Wien. Courtesy of the artist, Arratia, Beer, Berlin and
gb Agency, Paris. © Omer Fast.
p.  Kutluğ Ataman, Women Who Wear Wigs (). Installation view of a
four-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery,
London.
p.  Eija-Liisa Ahtila, If  Was  (). Installation view of a mm film
transferred to DVD, installation for  projections with sound, :. © Crystal
Eye Ltd, Helsinki, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
p.  Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages (-). Installation view of a
nineteen-channel video installation in three parts, colour, sound, : (looped)
at Being Singular Plural, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin ( June- October
). Photo: Mathias Schormann, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York and Paris. © Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
p.  Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages (-). Still of The Face (),
colour, sound, :. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New
York and Paris.
p.  Omer Fast, Nostalgia (). Production still from Nostalgia III, super
mm transferred to HD Video, colour, sound, :. Photo: Thierry Balnost,
courtesy of the artist, gb Agency, Paris, and Arratia, Beer, Berlin. © Omer Fast.
p.  Omer Fast, Nostalgia (). Installation view of Nostalgia II, two-channel
HD video (synchronized), colour, sound, :. Courtesy of the artist, gb Agency,
Paris, and Arratia, Beer, Berlin. © Omer Fast.
244 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Index
 Evenings: Theater and Engineering
(Armory, New York, ) n
Abramovic, Marina 
Seven Easy Pieces () 
Acconci, Vito n, n
Adorno,Theodor ,,,-,,,
, , -, n
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa , , , -,

If  Was  () , -, 
Ahwesh, Peggy , , n
The Color of Love () n
Aitken, Doug , , , , , , ,
, , n
Sleepwalkers () , , -, ,
, n
Electric Earth () 
Akerman, Chantal , , n,
n
News From Home () n
Alea, Tomás Gutiérrez 
Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias
del subdesarrollo, ) 
Allen, Woody n
Zelig () n
Altman, Robert n
Alys, Francis n
American Graffiti () , 
analogue , , , -, -, -,
-, , , , , , n,
n, n, n
See also exhibiting cinema; photochemical
film
Anderson, Wes n
Hotel Chevalier () n
The Darjeeling Limited () n
Andrew, Dudley n
Angel Eyes () n
Antonioni, Michelangelo 
Zabriskie Point () 
Apocalypse Now () 
apparatus ,,,,,,-,,
-, , , , , , , -,
, , , -, -, ,
, , n
See also dispositif
appropriation , -, , -,
, , , n
See also recycling; remake
Arcangel, Cory , n
Colors () , n
archive , , , -, , -, ,
, , , , 
Arnold, Martin , n
Aronofsky, Darren n
The Wrestler () n
art history , , , -, , ,
n, n, n, n,
n, n
Art Institute of Chicago 
Arthur, Paul 
Assche, Christine van , ,
Ataman,Kutluğ ,,,,,,
, , 
Küba () , 
The  Seasons of Veronica Read ()

Twelve () 
Women Who Wear Wigs () ,
, -, 
Atay, Fikret n
aura -, , , , , , -,
-, , n, n,
n
avant-garde cinema
See experimental film
Banner, Fiona , 
Apocalypse Now () 
Barney,Matthew ,,,,,
Cremaster  () 
Cremaster Cycle (-) ,
n
Barry, Iris 
Barrymore, Drew n
Bartana, Yael n
Barthes, Roland , , , n,
n, n
Baudelaire, Charles , , 
Baudrillard,Jean ,,,-,,

Baudry, Jean-Louis , , 
Baykal, Emre 
Bazin, André , , , , , n,
n, n
BeingSingularPlural:MovingImagesfrom
India (Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin,
) n
Bellour, Raymond -, , , , ,
,,,,,,,,,,
, n, n
Benjamin,Walter ,,,,-,,
-, -, -, -,
, , , 
Benning, James 
Berlin Alexanderplatz – An Exhibition
(Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary
Art, Berlin, and P.S., New
York, ) , , , 
Berloff, Andrea 
Bernadette Corporation 
Be Corpse () 
Between Cinema and a Hard Place (Tate
Modern, London, ) n
Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection
(Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, )
n
Biesenbach, Klaus -, n
Birnbaum, Daniel , , n
Birnbaum, Dara n
Technology/ Transformation: Wonder
Woman (-) n
Bismuth, Pierre , , -
Following the Right Hand of Louise
Brooks in Beauty Contest ()

Bloomberg, Michael n
Body Heat () 
Bois, Yve-Alain n
Bolter, Jay David n
Bonitzer, Pascal , n
Bordwell, David , n
Bourne Ultimatum, The () 
Bourriaud, Nicolas -, ,
n, n, n
Boutang, Yann Moulier , n
Boym, Svetlana 
Brakhage, Stan , n
Dog Star Man (-) n
Breitz, Candice , , -, ,
Becoming series () , , 
Becoming Drew () 
Father () , , n
Her (-) , , 
Him (-) -, 
Mother () , , n
Broodthaers, Marcel 
Brooks, Louise 
Brougher, Kerry 
Bruno, Giuliana , , 
Buckingham, Matthew , , , -,
, , , , , , n
Amos Fortune Road () , 
False Future () , , ,  
Muhheakantuck: Everything Has a
Name () 
Situation Leading to a Story () ,
, , -, , , 
Subcutaneous () 
Buergel, Roger -
Bulloch, Angela -, n
From the Eiffel Tower to the Riesenrad
() 
Solaris () 
Z Point () , , -n
Buñuel, Luis 
Un Chien andalou () 
Bürger, Peter n
246 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Bush, George W. 
Butler, Alison -
Butler, Judith 
Cahiers du cinéma , 
Cameron, James 
Avatar () , n
Campbell, Jim n
Illuminated Average # () n
Campbell, Neve n
Campus, Peter , n
Canyon Cinema , , n
Casetti, Francesco 
Cavell, Stanley n
CentreGeorgesPompidou ,,,,
, , 
Champ, The () n
Cinéma, Cinéma: Art and the Cinematic
Experience (Van Abbemuseum, Rotterdam,
) -n
Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the
Moving Image, The (Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington D.C., )
n
cinephilia , , , -, , ,
, , , , , n,
-n
Clair, René n
Entr’acte () 
The Crazy Ray (Paris qui dort, )
n
Clark, T.J. -
Cocteau, Jean , n
Coleman, James , , , , n,
n
Initials (-) 
Collateral: When Art Looks at Cinema
(Hangar Bicocca, Milan, )
n
Conner, Bruce 
Connolly, Maeve 
contingency , , , , , -, ,
, , -, , , , , , ,
, 
convergence , -, , , -, ,
, , , -, , -, , ,
, , n
See also remediation
Cornell, Joseph , 
Rose Hobart () 
Cogeval, Guy 
Cosic, Vuk n
ASCII History of Moving Images
() n
Crawford, Joan n
Crimp, Douglas 
Crowhurst, Donald 
Crush (Tang shou tai quan dao, ) 
Cut:Film asFoundObjectinContemporary
Video (Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee,
) n
Daney, Serge , , , n
Danto, Arturo 
Danza, Tony n
Dauthendey, Karl , , , ,
n
David, Catherine , 
David, Jacques-Louis n
The Rape of the Sabine Women ()
n
Day for Night (Whitney Biennial, New
York, ) 
Dean, Tacita , , -, , , , ,
, , -, , , , ,
n, n, n
Banewl () 
Bubble House () , , 
Darmstädter Werkblock 
Diamond Ring () 
Die Regimentstochter () 
Disappearance at Sea () -, 
Disappearance at Sea II () 
Fernsehturm () , , , , ,

Four, Five, Six, and Seven Leaf Clover
Collection (-present) 
Kodak () , 
Michael Hamburger () 
Noir et Blanc () 
Palast () , , , , , ,

Index 247
Section Cinéma () 
Teignmouth Electron () , 
The Green Ray () , , -,
, 
Totality () 
De Baecque, Antoine , , 
De Certeau , -, -n,
n
Debord, Guy , , 
Decherney, Peter 
Deer Hunter, The () 
Deleuze,Gilles ,,,,,n
Deller, Jeremy 
The Battle of Orgreave () 
Dellsperger, Brice , -n
body double series (-ongoing)
, 
body double  () 
body double  () -n
body double  () -n
body double  () n
body double  () n
body double  () n
body double  () , 
body double  () n
Demos, T.J. , n
De Palma, Brian , -n
Blow Out () 
Body Double () n
Dressed to Kill () , n
Sisters () n
De Rijke, Jeroen/Willem de Rooij , ,
, -, -, , -, , ,
, , , , -n,
n, -n
Bantar Gebang () , -n
For Bas Oudt (Voor Bas Oudt, )
-
Of Three Men () -n
Untitled () , -, , , ,
-n
De Rooij, Willem
See De Rijke, Jeroen
détournement -, , 
Diaz, Cameron n
Diderot, Denis n
Didi-Huberman, Georges 
dispositif -, , , , , ,
n
See also apparatus
Doane, Mary Ann , , , n
Documenta  (Kassel, ) -
Documenta  (Kassel, ) 
Documenta(Kassel,) ,n
Documenta  (Kassel, ) 
documentary -,,,,-,,
, , -, , , , ,
, , , , -, ,
, n, n, n
Dodd, Philip -n
Dolène, Lucie 
Dorsky, Nathaniel 
Douglas, Stan , , , , , , -,
, , , 
Overture () , , , , , ,

Hors Champs () 
Inconsolable Memories () 
Subject to a Film: Marnie () 
Draeger, Christoph 
Feel Lucky, Punk??! (-) 
Schizo (Redux) () 
Duchamp, Marcel 
Dunaway, Fay n
East of Borneo ()
Edison, Thomas , , 
Kicking Horse Canyon () 
White Pass, British Columbia () 
Egoyan, Atom 
Eleey, Peter 
Elsaesser, Thomas -, , n
entre-image (Bellour) , , , , ,
n, n
Enwezor, Okwui , n
exhibiting cinema , , -, , ,
, -, , , -, 
experimental film , , , -, ,
, , , -, , , , ,
, , , , , , n,
n, n, n, n,
248 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
n
Experiments with Truth (Fabric Workshop
and Museum, Philadelphia,
) n
Ezawa, Kota 
LYAM -D () 
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner -, 
Berlin Alexanderplatz () -
Fast, Omer , , -, , ,
, -
Nostalgia () , , -
Spielberg’s List () , -,
, 
The Casting () , , -,
, , -, -
Father of the Bride () n
fiction , , , , , , -,
, -, , -, -,
-, , n, n, n
filmstudies ,,,,,,-,
n, n, n, n
film theory , , , -, -, ,
,-,n,n,n,
n
Fincher, David n
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
() n
Fisher, Morgan , 
flâneur , -, 
See also spectatorship
Fluxus group , n
Ford, John , n
The Searchers () 
Foster, Hal -, , , , n
Foucault, Michel , , , 
found footage -, , , -,
,,,,,n,n
Fowler, Catherine 
Frey, Mattias 
Friedberg, Anne , , 
Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary
after Film (ZKM, Karlsruhe, )
n
Galerie Andreas Huber 
Galloway, Alex , 
Galt, Rosalind n
Gandhi, Mahatma , , n
Gehr, Ernie , , n
Eureka () , n
Gehry, Frank 
Gianikian, Yervant
See Ricci-Lucchi, Angela
Gierstberg, Frits n
Gidal, Peter , -
Gilda () 
Girardet, Christoph 
Glissant, Édouard 
Godard, Jean-Luc , , -, , ,
, , n, n, n
Contempt (Le Mépris, ) n
Histoire(s) du cinéma (-) ,

Masculin féminin:  faits précis ()

Passion () 
Pierrot le fou () 
The Old Place () , 
Godfrey, Mark , 
Goldstein, Jack n
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ()
n
Gonzalez-Foerster, Dominiqe ,
n
Goodbye, Lenin! () 
Good Mother, The () n
Gordon, Douglas , , , -,
, -, , , , ,
n, n
Five Year Drive By () 
 Hour Psycho () , , ,
-, , -n, n,
n, n
 hour psycho back and forth and to
and fro () 
Confessions of a Justified Sinner ()

Through a Looking Glass () 
Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait
(, with Philippe Parreno)
n
Index 249
Graham, Dan ,
Cinema () 
Graham, Rodney -
Rheinmetall/Victoria  () 
Greenaway, Peter , 
Greenberg, Clement , , , , ,
n, n
Griffith, D.W. -n
Grimonprez, Jonan 
Double Take () 
Grudge, The () 
Grusin, Richard n
Guggisberg, Anders 
Gunning, Tom , 
Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 
(Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, ) , , n
Hamburger Hill () 
Haneke, Michael 
Funny Games () 
Funny Games () 
Hanhardt, John n
Hansen, Mark n
Hansen, Miriam , , n,
n, n
Hardt, Michael 
Hay, Alex n
Heath, Stephen 
Hedren, Tippi 
Heidegger, Martin 
Hilderbrand, Lucas 
Hill, Gary , -, n
Between Cinema and a Hard Place
() , 
Tall Ships () 
Hitchcock,Alfred ,-,,,,
, , -, , , , n,
n, n, n
Blackmail () 
Dial “M” for Murder () n
Family Plot () n
Foreign Correspondent () ,
n
Marnie () 
North by Northwest () n
Notorious () , n
Psycho () , , , -,
-, , , n, n,
n
Rear Window () n
Rope () n
Saboteur () n
Shadow of a Doubt () n
Strangers on a Train () 
The Birds () 
The Man Who Knew Too Much (/
)
To Catch a Thief () n
Topaz () n
Torn Curtain () n
Vertigo () , n, n,
n
Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences fatales
(Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris,
, and Musée des beaux-arts de
Montréal, Montreal, ) , , ,
, n
Hoet, Jan 
Hoffman, Dustin n
Hollywood , -, , , -, ,
, -, , -, -,
-, -, -, , ,
, n, n, n
Hopper, Dennis n
Colors () n
Horrigan, Bill 
Horwath, Alexander -, 
Howard Wise Gallery 
Huillet, Danièle
See Straub, Jean-Marie
Huldisch, Henriette 
Husserl, Edmund n
Huyghe, Pierre -, , , ,
, , , n, n, -
n
A Journey That Wasn’t () n
Blanche Neige Lucie () 
Streamside Day Follies () n
The Third Memory () n
250 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Huyssen, Andreas 
Iles, Chrissie , , , , n
Illusion – Emotion – Realität,  Jahre
Kino: Die . Kunst auf der Suche nach
den  Andern (Kunsthaus Zürich,
Zurich, ) n
illusionism , , , , , , ,
, , 
Imaginary Crimes () n
immaterial labor , -, n,
n
indexicality -, , , -, -,
-, , -, -, , ,
, , n
intermediality -, -, , ,
n, n
Into the Light: The Projected Image in
American Art, - (Whitney
Museum of American Art, New
York, ) n, n, n
Jacobs, Ken , , n
Perfect Film () n
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son () ,
n
Jameson, Frederic , , , 
Jean Cocteau: Sur le fils du siècle (Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris, ) 
Jenkins, Henry , 
J-Horror 
Judd, Donald n, n
Stack () n
Julien, Isaac , n
Ju-on () 
Kanwar, Amar , , , , -,
, n
A Night of Prophecy () 
A Season Outside () 
Ma Win Maw Oo (, from The Torn
First Pages) , , n
The Face (, from The Torn First
Pages) , , -
The Lightning Testimonies () 
The Torn First Pages (-) ,
, , , , , -,
n
Thet Win Aung (, from The Torn
First Pages) , n
To Remember () 
Kaprow, Allan 
Kawara, On n
Today series () n
Keathley, Christian -n
Keaton, Diane n
Keitel, Harvey n
Kenneth Anger (P.S., New York, )
, 
Kentridge, William , , n
Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès
() , , n
Kiarostami, Abbas , 
Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, ) 
Kino wie noch nie (Generali Foundation,
Vienna, ) n
Kirby, Lynn n
kitsch , , n
Kittler, Friedrich 
Kracauer, Siegfried , , , n
Kramer vs. Kramer () , n
Krauss,Rosalind ,,,-,-,
n, n, n, n,
n, n, n, n
Kubelka, Peter , n
Arnulf Rainer () n
Kubrick, Stanley , n
Full Metal Jacket () 
Kuntzel, Thierry 
Lacan, Jacques n
Lang, Fritz 
The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse
(Der Tausend Augen des Doktor
Mabuse, ) n
Lange, Christy n
Lazzarato, Maurizio , -
Lee, Pamela M. -n, n
Legally Blonde () n
Léger, Ferdand 
Leighton, Tanya 
LeMouvementdesimages(CentreGeorges
Pompidou,Paris,) ,,,,
, , , n, n
Index 251
Lessig, Lawrence , 
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim , n
Levinas, Emmanuel 
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 
limited edition , -, -,
n
Lind, Maria 
Lindsay, Vachel , n
Lockhart, Sharon , 
Pine Flat () 
London, Barbara 
Longo, Robert 
Lopez, Jennifer n
Lotringer, Sylvère n
Lovink, Geert , n
Lowry, Glenn n
Lukács, Georg -
Lumière brothers , , , , ,
n, n, n
L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat ()

Lumière, Louis 
Feeding the Baby (Repas de bébé, )

Lynch, David n
MacDonald, Scott 
MacLaine, Shirley n
Magnum Force () 
Magritte, René 
Les eaux profondes () 
Mamoulian, Rouben 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde () 
Manovich, Lev , n
Marclay, Christian 
The Clock () 
Marian Goodman Gallery 
Marker, Chris , , , , ,
n
La Jetée () 
Sans soleil () , , ,
n
Martin, Steve n
Marx, Karl , n
McCall, Anthony , , 
McCoy, Kevin and Jennifer n
: A Space Algorithm ()
n
Learning from Las Vegas ()
n
McDonough, Tom m 
McLuhan, Marshall , n
McQueen, Steve , n, n,
n
Giardini () n
Hunger () n
Shame () n
medium specificity -, , , -,
, -, , -, -, , , ,
, , , , , , ,
, , -, n, n,
n
Mekas, Jonas , , 
Méliès, Georges n
Metz, Christian , , , ,
Michaud, Philippe-Alain , , , 
Miéville, Anne-Marie , 
Millais, John Everett 
Ophelia (-) 
mobility ,,,,,-,,-,
, , 
Mommie Dearest () , n
Mondloch, Kate 
Monk, Philip 
Morgan, Jessica , n
Morrison, Bill 
Decasia () , 
Moss, Kate 
Moukarbel, Chris , -, , ,
, n, n, n
World Trade Center  () ,
-, , , , , ,
n
Moving Pictures: Art and Cinema from
 to the Present Day (Ostwall
Museum, Dortmund, ) n
Muhle, Maria 
Muir, Gregor n
Müller, Matthias , n
The Phoenix Tapes (, with Christoph
Girardet) 
252 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Müller, Vanessa Joan 
Mulvey, Laura , m , , , ,
, , n
MuseumofModernArt(MoMA) ,,
, , , , , -, , n
Nabokov, Vladimir , -n
narrative , , , , , , , , ,
, -, -, , -, ,
, , -, -, -,
, , , , -, , ,
, n, n
Nash, Mark n
Nauman, Bruce , , n
Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning, )

Negri, Antonio 
Neshat, Shirin n
Feazeh () n
Munis () n
Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedune
mardan, ) n
Newman, Michael , , 
Nichols, Bill , 
Nicholson, Jack , , n
Night of the Hunter, The () 
nonfiction
See documentary
nostalgia , , -, -, -,
-, -, , , 
Notorious: Hitchcock and Contemporary
Art(MuseumofModernArt,Oxford,
) , , , n
Novak, Kim , n
novelty , -, , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , 
obsolescence , , , , , , -,
-, , , -, -, -, ,
, , , , , n
O’Doherty, Brian , , , 
optical unconscious (Benjamin) , ,
, n
Ordinary People () n
otheredcinema ,-,,,,,
, , -
Otolith Group n
Oursler, Tony n
Paik, Nam June , , n, n
Zen for Film (-) 
Païni,Dominique ,,-,,-,
, , -, , , , , -
n
Pantenburg, Volker , 
Passages de l’image (Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, ) , -, ,
n
photochemical film -, , , -,
-, -, -, , -, , ,
, , , , , -,
n, n, n, n,
n, n, n
Plato n
Pontecorvo, Gillo 
Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri,
) 
Postcards from the Edge () n
Poussin, Nicolas 
Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake
(c.) 
Landscape with a Calm (-) 
Pretty Woman () n
Prince, Stephen n
Prix de beauté () 
Projected Video (Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, )
n
projection ,,,,,,,,,
, -, , , n,
n, n
analogue film projection , , ,
, -, -, , , ,
n, n, n, n
large-scale projection , , , ,
-, , , , , ,
, , 
multiscreen projection , , -,
-, , -, -, ,
, , , -, -,
, 
slide projection , , , n,
n
Index 253
video projection , , , -,
-, , -, -, -,
, n, n, n,
n
Proust, Marcel , , 
Quandt, James 
Raad, Walid n
Racine, Bruno , 
Radical Software Group , n
RSG-BLACK- () 
Rambo franchise (-) 
Rancière, Jacques , , , 
Rauschenberg, Robert n
recycling , , -, , -,
-, , , , n, n,
n
See also appropriation; found footage;
remake
reenactment , -, -, ,
, n, n
remake , , , , , -, ,
-, -, -, -
,,,,,,,n,
n, n, n, -n,
n, -n
See also appropriation
remediation -, , n
See also convergence
Renoir, Jean n
Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu,
) n
Renov, Michael , 
Resnais, Alain 
Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière
à Marienbad, ) 
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard,
) 
Ricci-Lucchi, Angela, and Yervant
Gianikian 
From the Pole to the Equator (Dal polo
all’equatore, ) 
Ringu () 
Ring, The () 
Rist, Pipilotti , -, , , ,
n, n
Pour Your Body Out [ Cubic Meters]
() , , , -, ,
, n
Pepperminta () n
Rives, Ben 
Roberts, Julia n, n
Rodowick n, n, n
Rohmer, Éric 
Summer (Le Rayon vert, ) 
room-for-play (Benjamin) -, ,
, n
Rosen, Philip 
Rosenbaum, Jonathan , n
Rouch, Jean , 
Gare du nord (segment from Paris vu
par..., )
Les Maîtres fous () 
Royoux, Jean-Christophe 
ruin , , , , , -, -, ,
, 
Ryan, Meg n
Sadoul, Georges n
Sala, Anri n, n
Salavon, Jason n
Top Grossing Films series (-)
n
Saltz, Jerry , 
Sarcevic, Bojan n
Schlobach, Willy 
La morte () 
Schnabel, Julian n
Basquiat () n
Before Night Falls () n
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le
Scaphandre et le papillion, )
n
Scott, A.O. 
Scott, Ridley , 
Black Hawk Down () , ,
n
Thelma and Louise () 
Scream and Scream Again (Museum of
Modern Art, Oxford, ) n
Serres, Michael n
Sharits, Paul , 
254 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Sherman, Cindy 
She’s Out of Control () n
Sirk, Douglas 
Imitation of Life () 
Sitney, P. Adams n
Situationist International , , ,
, ,  n
Smithson, Robert n
Snow, Michael , , , , , 
Wavelength () 
Snow White in Snow White and the Seven
Dwarves () 
Sobchack, Vivian , n
society of control (Deleuze) , , ,
-, , 
Sokarno, Ibu Fatmawati 
Sonnier, Keith 
Sontag, Susan 
Spears, Dorothy 
spectacle , -, , , , ,
-, -, -, -,
-, , , , n
cinema as mass spectacle , , ,
, , , , 
critique of spectacle , , ,
-
spectacularization of art -, ,
, -, -, , , , 
spectacularization of the museum
, -, -, , , -, ,
-, , 
spectatorship , , , , , , ,
, , , , -, -,
-, , -, n, n,
n, n
activity and passivity , -, ,
, -, -, -,
, , 
and mobility -, , , , ,
, 
museum/gallery vs. cinematic ,
-, , -, , , -,
-, , , 
“possessive spectator” (Mulvey)
-, 
See also flâneur; mobility; room for
play (Benjamin)
Spielberg, Steven , 
Schindler’s List () , 
Spellbound (Hayward Gallery, London,
) , n
Staehle, Wolfgang n, n
Empire / (-) n
Stahl, John 
Imitation of Life () 
Starling, Simon -
Wilhelm Noack oHG () , 
Steinberg, Leo n
Stepmom () , n
Stewart, Susan , 
Steyerl, Hito , , n
Stone, Oliver , , 
Born on the Fourth of July () 
Natural Born Killers () 
Platoon () 
World Trade Center () , ,
, 
Straub, Jean-Marie/Danièle Huillet
n
Cézanne () n
Streep, Meryl , , n
Sun Alley (Sonnenallee, ) 
Sunset Boulevard () 
Sussman, Eve n
 Seconds at Alcazar () n
The Rape of the Sabine Women ()
n
Sutherland, Donald n
Sweetest Thing, The () n
Tan, Fiona , n
Tarantino, Quentin 
Pulp Fiction () 
Tarkovsky, Andrei , 
Solaris (Solayris, ) , 
Tarr, Béla 
Sátántango () 
Tate Modern -n, n,
n
Taubin, Amy , n
Taylor-Wood, Sam , , , ,
Index 255
n
A Little Death () , n
Nowhere Boy () n
Still Life () , n
Taxi Driver () , 
Tel Quel 
Terminator franchise (-) 
Ter Steege, Johanna 
Tessier, Danièle n
Thacker, Eugene 
Three to Tango () n
Time Zones: Recent Film and Video (Tate
Modern, London, ) n,
n
trace
See indexicality
Treasures of Tutankhamen (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, ) 
Trodd, Tamara -, n, n
Truffaut, François 
The  Blows (Les  coups, )

Tscherkassky, Peter n
Tudor, David n
Usai, Paolo Cherchi 
Vasulka, Woody n
Velásquez, Diego n
Las Meninas () n
Valenti, Jack -
Van Sant, Gus , n
Psycho () 
video projection
See projection
Viénet, René 
Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique
peut-elle casser des briques?
) 
Viola, Bill , , , , -m,
n
The Arc of Ascent () , ,
The Greeting () -n
The Quintet of Astonished () -
n
Virilio, Paul 
Voight, Jon n
Vorspannkino (Kunst-Werke, Berlin,
) n
Vostell, Wolf 
Voyage(s)enutopie,JLG,-:àlarecherche
d’un théorème perdu (Voyage(s)
inUtopia,JLG,-:InSearchofa
Lost Theorem, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, ) , , -,
n, n
Wagner, Anne 
Wall, Jeff 
Walley, Jonathan , 
Warhol, Andy , 
Blow Job () , , , 
Wasser, Frederick n
Wasson, Haidee , n
Weibel, Peter 
Welles, Orson , 
Citizen Kane () 
F For Fake () 
Whitman, Robert n, n
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? () 
Willemen, Paul , , , n,
Wilson, Jane and Louise , 
Stasi City () 
Unfolding the Aryan Papers ()

Wishful Thinking () n
Witherspoon, Reese n
Wollen, Peter 
Yang, Fudong n
Youngblood, Gene , 
You’ve Got Mail () n
256 Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art
Film Culture in Transition
General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser
Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.)
Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 
isbn paperback     
Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.)
Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 
isbn paperback     
Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.)
Film and the First World War, 
isbn paperback     
Warren Buckland (ed.)
The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Egil Törnqvist
Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Thomas Elsaesser (ed.)
A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Thomas Elsaesser
Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.)
Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Siegfried Zielinski
Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Kees Bakker (ed.)
Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Egil Törnqvist
Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.)
The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard -, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.)
Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
William van der Heide
Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Bernadette Kester
Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the
Weimar Period (-), 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.)
Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 
isbn paperback     
Ivo Blom
Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Alastair Phillips
City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris -, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.)
The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the s, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover    
Thomas Elsaesser (ed.)
Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Kristin Thompson
Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I,

isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.)
Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Thomas Elsaesser
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Michael Walker
Hitchcock’s Motifs, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Nanna Verhoeff
The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Anat Zanger
Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Wanda Strauven
The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Malte Hagener
Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film
Culture, -, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street
Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in s European
Cinema, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Jan Simons
Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Marijke de Valck
Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Asbjørn Grønstad
Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.)
Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Pasi Väliaho
Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa , 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Pietsie Feenstra
New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Eivind Røssaak (ed.)
Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Tara Forrest
Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 
isbn paperback     ; isbn hardcover     
Belén Vidal
Figuring the Past. Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 
isbn     
Bo Florin
Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood -, 
isbn     