Textbook Ebook Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices Kim Knowles All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices Kim Knowles All Chapter PDF
Experimental Film
and Photochemical
Practices
Kim Knowles
Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image
Series Editors
Kim Knowles
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth, UK
Jonathan Walley
Department of Cinema
Denison University
Granville, OH, USA
Existing outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema, the field of experi-
mental film and artists’ moving image presents a radical challenge not only
to the conventions of that cinema but also to the social and cultural norms
it represents. In offering alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the
world, it brings to the fore different visions and dissenting voices. In re-
cent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal to a more
central position as it comes to bear upon critical topics such as medium
specificity, ontology, the future of cinema, changes in cinematic exhibition
and the complex interrelationships between moving image technology,
aesthetics, discourses, and institutions. This book series stakes out excit-
ing new directions for the study of alternative film practice – from the
black box to the white cube, from film to digital, crossing continents and
disciplines, and developing fresh theoretical insights and revised histories.
Although employing the terms ‘experimental film’ and ‘artists’ moving
image’, we see these as interconnected practices and seek to interrogate
the crossovers and spaces between different kinds of oppositional film-
making.
We invite proposals on any aspect of non-mainstream moving image
practice, which may take the form of monographs, edited collections, and
artists’ writings both historical and contemporary. We are interested in
expanding the scope of scholarship in this area, and therefore welcome
proposals with an interdisciplinary and intermedial focus, as well as studies
of female and minority voices. We also particularly welcome proposals
that move beyond the West, opening up space for the discussion of Latin
American, African and Asian perspectives.
Experimental Film
and Photochemical
Practices
Kim Knowles
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth, UK
Cover image: A strip of phytogram imagery from It Matters What, Francisca Duran, 2019
Cover design by eSTudioCalamar
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For all the photochemical radicals and free spirits.
Acknowledgements
My interest in photochemical film practice in the digital era was first ig-
nited in 2008 when I saw Jeanne Liotta’s Loretta (2003) projected on
16mm at the Filmhouse cinema in Edinburgh. I was running a small
film festival called Diversions and Teale Failla, a postgraduate student
from New York, had put together a screening of work by Liotta, Jen-
nifer Reeves, M. M. Serra, Joel Schlemowitz among others. She proba-
bly has no idea how much that screening changed my life. Since then,
most of my academic work and much of my curation has been devoted
to contemporary engagements with a medium largely deemed obsolete. I
have returned to Loretta constantly and I am deeply thankful to Jeanne
for those images that led me on a long and exciting journey. Over the
years, I have crossed paths with a great many people with a similar pas-
sion and I have been inspired by their creativity, warmth and openness.
It’s difficult for me to imagine this book being written without them,
but it’s equally difficult to name them all. Every encounter, every conver-
sation and every film screening somehow resonate through these pages.
Heartfelt thanks to Jenny Baines, Erika Balsom, Dianna Barrie, Christo-
pher Becks, Lydia Beilby, Martine Beugnet, Stephen Broomer, Brad But-
ler, Guillaume Cailleau, Stefano Canapa, Pip Chodorov, David Curtis,
Karel Doing, Helen de Witt, Anja Dornieden, Franci Duran, Kelly Egan,
Phillip Fleischmann, David Gatten, Sandra Gibson, Sally Golding, Juan
David González Monroy, Nicky Hamlyn, Bea Haut, Gabriele Jutz, Chris
Kennedy, Eva Kolcze, Karl Lemieux, Luis Macías, Pablo Mazzolo, Penny
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Festival and Filmhouse has fed my passion and has given me important ac-
cess to films and filmmakers that I might never have encountered. I have
several people to thank there—employees past and present—for always
having faith in my ideas and for continuing to provide a vital infrastruc-
ture for 16mm and 35mm screenings, as well as countless complicated
set-ups: Mark Adams, Ali Blaikie, Emma Boa, David Boyd, Ali Clarke,
Chris Fujiwara, Niall Greig Fulton, Diane Henderson, James Rice, Evi
Tsiligaridou and Rod White.
A special thank you to all my colleagues at Aberystwyth University
for their patience and the best home-baking I’ve ever tasted, and to
Emily Wood, Lina Aboujieb and the anonymous peer reviewers at Pal-
grave Macmillan for helping me through the crucial publication stages.
Most importantly, much love and endless gratitude to Tree, who, with
the patience of a saint, has been my rock, my reality checker, my deadline
setter and my proof-reader.
Contents
xi
xii CONTENTS
Bibliography 229
Index 245
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Closed Circuit, Sasha Pirka, 2013. Installation view, ‘Slow
Down! Cinematic approaches on reduction’, 8 November—16
December 2018, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna © Kunsthalle
Exnergasse (Photo: Wolfgang Thaler, 2017) 12
Fig. 1.2 The Clouds Are Not Like Either One—They Do Not Keep One
Form Forever, Viktoria Schmid, 2015. Installation view, ‘Slow
Down! Cinematic approaches on reduction’, 8 November—16
December 2018, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna © Kunsthalle
Exnergasse (Photo: Wolfgang Thaler, 2017) 14
Fig. 2.1 Polte (Flame), Sami van Ingen, 2018 (Image courtesy of the
artist and testifilmi) 30
Fig. 2.2 Loretta, Jeanne Liotta, 2003 (Image courtesy of the artist) 32
Fig. 2.3 Loretta, Jeanne Liotta, 2003. Black and white rayograms prior
to the addition of colour (Image courtesy of the artist) 33
Fig. 2.4 Sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, Tomonari
Nishikawa, 2014 (Image courtesy of Light Cone) 49
Fig. 3.1 Three frames from Bouquets 9, Rose Lowder, 1995, filmed
near the town of Signes, Var, in the south-east of France
(Image courtesy of Light Cone) 77
Fig. 3.2 Parties Visible et Invisible d’Un Ensemble Sous Tension,
Emmanuel Lefrant, 2009 (Image courtesy of Light Cone) 83
Fig. 3.3 Le Pays Dévasté, Emmanuel Lefrant, 2015 (Image courtesy
of Light Cone) 84
Fig. 3.4 Primal, Vicky Smith, 2016. Installation photo by
Deborah Weinreb (Image courtesy of the artist) 90
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 4.4 Markings 1-3, Eva Kolcze, 2011 (Image courtesy of the
artist) 163
Fig. 4.5 Negative imagery in Strawberries in the Summertime,
Jennifer Reeves, 2013 (Image courtesy of the artist) 166
Fig. 4.6 Split toning in Strawberries in the Summertime, Jennifer
Reeves, 2013 (Image courtesy of the artist) 167
Fig. 4.7 Split toning in Crashing Skies, Penny McCann, 2012
(Image courtesy of the artist) 169
Fig. 4.8 Farm animals coexisting in vulture, Philip Hoffman, 2019
(Image courtesy of the artist) 172
Fig. 4.9 Traces of hand-processing in vulture, Philip Hoffman, 2019
(Image courtesy of the artist) 173
Fig. 5.1 Diffraktion 2017 at LaborBerlin. Expanded film set-up
(above: New Museum of Mankind by OJOBOCA, and below:
Highview and Cluster Click City Sundays by Simon Liu)
(Photo: Laurence Favre. Image courtesy of LaborBerlin) 192
Fig. 5.2 Installation view of Absolute Pitch II, Louisa Fairclough,
2014 (Photo: Oskar Proctor. Image courtesy of the artist
and Danielle Arnaud) 200
Fig. 5.3 Threadbare, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, 2013.
Installation view, Gibson + Recoder Studio, Brooklyn,
New York (Photo: Rachel Hamburger. Image courtesy of the
artists) 203
Fig. 5.4 Light Spill, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, 2005.
Installation view, ‘Borderline Behaviour: Drawn Towards
Animation’, 25 January–18 March 2007, TENT, Rotterdam
(Photo: Roel Meelkop. Image courtesy of the artists and
TENT) 204
Fig. 5.5 Documentation of Ghost - Loud + Strong, performance by
Sally Golding at Cable Festival, Nantes, 2016 (Photo: Pierre
Acobas. Image courtesy of the artist) 208
Fig. 5.6 Documentation of Cipher Screen, performance by Greg
Pope at Inmute Festival, Athens, 2015 (Image courtesy of the
artist) 210
Fig. 5.7 Section of a filmstrip used in the performance of Cipher Screen
by Greg Pope (Image courtesy of the artist) 211
Fig. 5.8 Documentation of Parallaxe, performed by Nominoë
(Image courtesy of Emmanuel Lefrant) 213
Fig. 5.9 Documentation of Light Leaks, performed by Filmwerkplaats
at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, January 2016
(Image courtesy of Nan Wang) 214
CHAPTER 1
Throughout the recent wave of books and articles on the current state
of film in the digital era one finds more or less the same conclusion:
film, or cinema, in its previous incarnation is no longer. The technolog-
ical shifts that have been taking place since the 1990s have dislodged
the ontological foundations of the medium as well as its spaces of recep-
tion.1 As several writers have demonstrated, we now live in an era of dig-
ital ‘convergence’, where the moving image manifests in numerous forms
and contexts, sliding across a multitude of platforms and implicating the
spectator/consumer in new ways.2 What was previously associated with
the cinematic experience has exploded into a moving image environment
that resists any unified definition and infiltrates almost every aspect of our
lives, from small handheld devices to gigantic public screens. Accordingly,
current scholarship sets out to navigate this heterogeneous terrain and to
make sense of its multifaceted and dispersed nature, revisiting and revising
established theories whilst developing new ones. For André Gaudreault
and Philippe Marion, ‘cinema is going through a major identity crisis’,3
whilst for Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord the scope is wider—‘digital
technologies are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual
cultures’, they state, appropriating Gene Youngblood’s concept of ‘ex-
panded cinema’ to account for the new landscape of ‘immersive, interac-
tive, and interconnected forms of culture’.4 Clearly, it is not just cinema
that is questioned in the digital era, but the entire realm of human expe-
rience: artistic expression, forms of communication and modes of being.
Disentangling one from the other is a challenging task, and their interre-
latedness demands theoretical approaches capable of teasing out the com-
plexities.
Until quite recently, discussions of technological transition were domi-
nated by the problematic concept of ‘new media’, a term that, like a stone
skimming across the surface of water, gained momentum with each suc-
cessive scholarly text dedicated to it. In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s intro-
duction to the revised 2016 edition of New Media, Old Media: A History
and Theory Reader, aptly titled ‘Somebody Said New Media’, several key
issues are put into play. ‘To talk of new media in the early twenty-first cen-
tury’, observes Chun, ‘seems odd: exhausted and exhausting.’5 Not least
because, tied to corporate interests, the increasing rate of technological
replacement means that nothing is ever new for very long. ‘To call some-
thing new’, Chun continues, ‘is to guarantee that it will one day be old;
it is to place it within a cycle of obsolescence, in which it will inevitably
disappoint and be replaced by something else that promises, once again,
the new’.6 This intricate relationship between the old and the new is cen-
tral to understanding what is at stake when we talk about ‘new media’
or ‘new technology’, and it has certainly been one of the focal points in
criticisms of ‘newness’. From Charles Acland’s perspective:
An inappropriate amount of energy has gone into the study of new media,
new genres, new communities, and new bodies, that is into the contem-
porary forms. Often, the methods of doing so have been at the expense
of taking account of continuity, fixity and dialectical relations with existing
practices, systems and artifacts.7
In the heady rush to embrace and theorise the ‘new’, we have neglected
to consider the wider cultural, economic and ideological implications of
the recent technological (r)evolution, including the ever-changing notion
of the ‘old’ and its precarious position in art, culture and society.
that excites me no longer functions in its own time’.26 Clearly this isn’t
simply a case of refusing to move with the times, but of cultivating a
deeper sensitivity to the way that different temporalities rub up against
each other to produce alternative perceptions and artistic possibilities. No
longer functioning in its own time is not ceasing to function altogether;
it is, as Rollot points out, and as Dean suggests, continuing to function
according to different rules, via a different pathway, ‘despite everything ’.
Anachronism plays a crucial role in the forms of material understand-
ing that I outline in the next chapter, since the obsolete object is almost
always defined by a material excess that is somehow out of kilter with
the modern world. In the case of film, it is the bulky and cumbersome
equipment with its stubborn mechanical presence that signifies times past,
but which also stimulates a counter-cultural impulse to travel in opposite
directions. Dutch artist Esther Urlus refers to the pleasures of working
with ‘useless media’, where use value relates to the potential to gener-
ate profit through perpetual ‘innovation’.27 Having dropped out of this
cycle, photochemical film finds itself in a position of relative freedom, no
longer useful in one sense, but endlessly valuable in another. Innovation
becomes multidirectional and (re)invention often involves looking back-
wards in order to move forwards.