Identity Crisis: ExperimentalFilm and Artistic Expansion*

JONATHAN WALLEY

OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 23–50. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The radical transformations that took place in the arts after the SecondWorld War reached a crescendo in the 1960s. The nature and possibilities of eachart form were fundamentally rethought, while the idea that these art forms couldbe clearly distinguished from one another gave way to intensive experimentationwith cross-fertilization and mixing. Recall Allan Kaprow’s statement, “The youngartist of today need no longer say ‘I am a painter,’ or ‘I am a dancer.’ He is simplyan ‘artist.’”1 Or this definition by Joseph Kosuth:

Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one isquestioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioningthe nature of art . . . That’s because the word “art” is general andthe word “painting” is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If youmake paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) thenature of art.2

In the visual and performing arts, this period is described using terms like“expanded arts,” “dematerialization,” “intermedia,” and, more recently, the “post-medium condition.”3 The parallel term in film is “expanded cinema.” Put simply,it refers to cinema expanding beyond the bounds of traditional uses of celluloidfilm, the medium that had defined it for over six decades, to inhabit a wide rangeof other materials and forms.4

* This essay is dedicated to the memory of Adolfas Mekas.1. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57 (October 1958), p. 57.2. Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings,1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Cuercio (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 18. “Art After Philosophy”originally appeared in Studio International (October 1969), and Kosuth first made this statement inArthur R. Rose, “Four Interviews,” Arts Magazine 43 (February 1969), p. 23.3. The term is Rosalind Krauss’s. See “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition,” October116 (Spring 2006), pp. 55–62, and A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition(London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).4. I will use “celluloid film” to refer to all the physical components of the film medium takentogether, as traditionally employed by filmmakers: camera, lenses, photochemical filmstrip, projector,and screen. I will use “standard uses” and “traditional practices” to refer to conventional filmmaking,as opposed to expanded-cinema practices in which the physical components of the film medium aremultiplied, rearranged, replaced with other materials, abandoned, and/or used outside of the typicaltheatrical screening context.

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As originally described by critics like Gene Youngblood and Sheldan Renan,expanded cinema included video and television, light shows, computer art, multi-media installat ion and performance, kinet ic sculpture and theater, andholography, to name a few forms. It encompassed everything from mass-markettheatrical films (Youngblood discusses Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A SpaceOdyssey) to experimental film (e.g., Michael Snow’s Wavelength and the films ofAndy Warhol) to “kinesthetic” happenings and performances that employed nomoving-image media whatsoever. As Youngblood had it, “When we say expandedcinema we actually mean expanded consciousness . . . Expanded cinema isn’t amovie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive tomanifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.”5

The expansion of cinema was often characterized as liberating filmmakersfrom tradition and convention. As Renan wrote in 1967, expanded cinemarejected the idea “that motion pictures should be made to universal specificationson given machines under given and never changing conditions.”6 Cinema was now“liberated from the concept of standardization.”7 Like Youngblood, Renan con-ceived of “cinema” in the broadest possible terms. Any material that could be usedto control or manipulate light and time—metal, magnetic tape, plastic, glass, thehuman body—could be a cinematic material.

But if this liberation of cinema from the confines of the standard uses of cel-luloid film opened a door onto an exciting world of possibilities, it also raisedconcerns among filmmakers about the very identity of their art form. And it wasspecifically within experimental film that this expansion reverberated most force-fully, given that world’s proximity to (which is not to say its inclusion in) the artworld. While many filmmakers and sympathetic critics felt some of the same skep-ticism toward traditional practices with media that animated the expanded arts ingeneral, they must also have had reservations about the implications of cinema’sexpansion. A belief in and commitment to the specificity of film had been key tothe assertion of cinema’s autonomy within the pantheon of the arts and, as impor-tant, to experimental cinema’s articulation of its identity as an artistic tradition.To cast off the film medium was to risk losing a connection to a tradition withwhich contemporaneous experimental filmmakers identified as artists and earliergenerations had labored to build and nurture.

That the exploration of new intermedia forms in the name of expanded cin-ema dovetailed with the sudden surge of interest in the moving image in the artworld only complicated matters. As cinema expanded in the direction of otherarts, these other arts reached toward cinema for a way to extend their major aes-thet ic interests, much as they had done in the 1920s. Together, the twinphenomena of expanded cinema and the proliferation of moving images in the

5. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), p. 41.6. Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co.,1967), p. 227.7. Ibid., p. 227.

museum and gallery introduced cinema to new spaces and forms, and brought tobear upon it new discourses: expanded cinema’s language of new media, interme-dia, and synesthesia, on the one hand, and the art world’s post-Minimalisttheorizing, on the other hand, wherein cinema became “sculptural,” “performa-tive,” “conceptual,” and, in a more contemporary theoretical formulation,“post-medium.”

An early expression of concern over these developments was AnnetteMichelson’s critically important essay “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” first pub-lished in Film Culture in 1966. According to Michelson, the erasure of boundariesbetween the arts and the ethic of intermedia at the heart of expanded cinemathreatened to derail radical filmmaking’s quest for autonomy and drain cinema ofits potential power:

The questioning of the values of formal autonomy has led to anattempted dissolution of distinctions or barriers between media. . . .Cinema, on the verge of winning the battle for the recognition of itsspecificity—and every major filmmaker and critic in the last half-century has fought that battle—is now engaged in a reconsiderationof its aims. The Victor now questions his Victory. The emergence ofnew “intermedia,” the revival of the old dream of synesthesia, thecross-fertilization of dance, theater, and film . . . constitute a syn-drome of that radicalism’s crisis, both formal and social.8

In this essay, Michelson chastised certain experimental filmmakers for uncriti-cally parroting the rhetoric of other art forms (for example, Brakhage’s associationof his films with Abstract Expressionism, or “action painting”). Michelson acknowl-edged the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of film drawing upon the other arts.But for artistic cross-fertilization to bear fruit, each of the interacting art formsneeded to be secure in its “respective ontologies.”9 As the youngest art form, cin-ema—its sense of ontological identity still maturing—was the most susceptible tolosing its independence by borrowing the forms and ideas of the other arts.

Though Michelson did not make the point explicitly, one implication of heressay was that experimental cinema was especially at risk of losing its identity andindependence in the context of cinema’s expansion. It may indeed have been that“every major filmmaker and critic in the last half-century” had contributed to cin-ema’s struggle for autonomy, but experimental film lacked the high-culturalprofile and well-established economic and institutional infrastructures of moremainstream cinematic modes such as Hollywood cinema and the international artfilm—not to mention the other arts. Moreover, experimental film was historically,aesthetically, and institutionally interconnected with the other arts in ways that

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8. Annette Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” in The Film Culture Reader, ed. P. AdamsSitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 420.9. Ibid., p. 420.

Hollywood and the art cinema weren’t, making it more difficult to define againstthe backdrop of the media-focused expanded and inter-arts practices of theperiod. Michelson’s essay, therefore, was an important intervention in that it sawthe question of cinema’s identity not solely in aesthetic terms but in institutional(i.e., economic) ones as well. As we shall see, her concerns were felt by filmmakersat the time, and remain relevant today.

Expanded cinema and the embrace of the moving image by the art world thusthreatened two intertwined endeavors undertaken by filmmakers and critics fordecades: the definition of their art form and the establishment of its autonomy—and therefore its worth—among the other arts. Once cinema stepped beyond thebounds of standard practices with the physical medium that had embodied it forover sixty years, how was it to be defined, or even recognized? If cinema could bemade from so many other materials, what made the resulting forms distinct fromthose of the other arts? As it entered the gallery and museum, what, if anything,secured its status as “cinematic” as opposed to sculptural, painterly, or something inthe gray zones in between? In short, if cinema could be anything, what was to pre-vent it from becoming nothing, from dissolving into the generalized mass ofsynesthetic intermedia art, the return of the Gesamtkunstwerk? The question was nolonger “what is cinema?” but “what isn’t cinema?”

Thus, simultaneous with cinema’s expansion was a concentrated program ofmedium-specific filmmaking in the form of Structural and Structural-materialistfilm; many filmmakers engaged in this kind of work had come to experimentalcinema from the other arts, often continuing to produce work in these othermediums while making films that aggressively asserted the materiality of the cellu-loid-film medium and it s uniqueness. This paradox went to the roots ofexperimental cinema, which had, after all, begun with the cinematic experimentsof avant-garde artists such as Fernand Léger, Hans Richter, Salvador Dali, MarcelDuchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, etc.

The expansion of cinema, then, reanimated some of the fundamental ques-tions and paradoxes of experimental cinema’s history; these have continued tovex artists and scholars into the present day. Nearly ten years after “Film and theRadical Aspiration,” Michelson, in an essay on Paul Sharits, wondered about the“nature and limits” of Sharits’s “locational” film works (gallery installations featur-ing film loops on multiple projectors) and their relationship to sculpture: that is,the ontological consequences attending film’s move into the gallery space.10 In1984, well past the period of Structural and Structural-materialist film’s concen-trated study of celluloid film’s specificity, the filmmaker Michael Mazière couldstill lament, “Unfortunately experimental film often remains largely dependenton more established fine arts practices, unsure of its context.”11 He concluded,

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10. Annette Michelson, “Paul Sharits and the Critique of Illusionism: an Introduction,” Film Culture65–66 (1978), pp. 87–89.11. Michael Mazière, “Towards a Specific Practice,” in The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’Film and Video, ed. Michael Mazière and Nina Danino (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 43.

“The quest is still for a language which can describe, define, propose and questionthe issues at work [in experimental film] without being purely derivative of otherpractices, a space where new terms are engendered through, by and with a filmpractice confident of its specific independence.”12

The last decade or so has seen a resurgence of critical interest in the issuesraised by expanded cinema and the art world’s turn toward the moving image.The questions posed by earlier generations of artists and scholars seem all themore pressing and confusing today, surrounded as we are by a new surge of mov-ing-image art in the gallery (by Matthew Barney, Shirin Neshat, Tacita Dean,Rodney Graham, and others) and the rapid proliferation of “new media” forms—the spread of digital moving-image technology that is ushering in a new chapterof cinema’s expansion. But once again, the difficulty of defining expanded cinemapresents itself, as does the related problem of pinning down cinema’s specificitywithin an ever-widening field. The place of experimental cinema, too, is still aquestion to be reckoned with.

As Chrissie Iles noted in a talk at the Tate Modern’s controversial conferenceon expanded cinema in 2008, the challenge of defining expanded cinema stemsfrom fact that cinema itself—pre-expansion, as it were—was so heterogeneousthat the label “expanded” seems redundant; the cinema, that is, was “alwaysalready” expanded. Iles thus offered a distinction between Expanded Cinema(“capital E, capital C,” as she put it), which had been “a specific historicalmoment” growing out of Structural and Structural-materialist film, and an “ongo-ing expansion and contraction of the cinema” that could be traced back to thepre-cinematic past—at least as far back as experiments with anamorphism duringthe Baroque period. Expanded Cinema (capitalized) was simply one moment—ifan especially rich and important one—in the more generalized process by whichcinema’s ontology is always being redefined and re-historicized, a process that con-tinues into the present moment of new, digital media.13

Iles’s phrase “expansion and contraction” speaks to a give-and-take betweena radically expanded ontology that projects cinema across a multiplicity of formsand materials, on the one hand, and a narrower, medium-specific ontology thatseeks to differentiate cinema from the other arts, on the other. Iles’s suggestivedistinction, including her identification of a historically specific ExpandedCinema tied directly to the tradition of experimental cinema, is worth pursuingfurther. The increasingly unwieldy mass of forms and materials placed under theheading of expanded cinema has rendered the term, capitalized or not, bloated tothe point of near meaninglessness. The all-encompassing generality of the term

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12. Ibid., p. 44.13. Chrissie Iles, “Inside Out: Expanded Cinema and Its Relationship to the Gallery in the 1970s,”(paper presented at “Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception,” Tate Modern, London,April 17–19, 2009), http://www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded/Narrative/Tate_Doc_Session _2_-CI.html.(accessed May 9, 2011). The filmmaker Bradley Eros employs the same distinction between “expand-ed” and “contracted” cinema in “There Will Be Projections in All Dimensions,” Millennium Film Journal43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005), p. 66.

loses sight of all manner of specific practices—distinct artistic currents that onceflowed into expanded cinema and have since flowed out in new directions.

For instance, it seems unlikely that most of the artists represented inYoungblood’s landmark book Expanded Cinema thought of their work in terms of “thecinematic.” Instead, “expanded cinema” named a cluster of nascent art forms thathave subsequently become more distinct: video art, media art and activism, perfor-mance art, moving-image installation, experimental and alternative television,kinetic art, light art, and the electronic arts and “new media” more generally (includ-ing the earliest stages of computer art and the precursors of Internet art). In themoment that all of these new media and forms were appearing, “expanded cinema”was a handy catchall for any work involving moving images, electronic media, light,time, etc. But it could only be a temporary designation; as time passed, these embry-onic art forms specified their practices and developed their own histories defined bymajor artists and works, supporting institutions, and distinct critical languages andconcepts. Moving-image work in the gallery, too, distinguished itself from “cinema”by invoking the language of the other arts, particularly the “sculptural,” a categorythat had radically expanded. That distinction—between the sculptural moving-imageart of the gallery and the cinematic work of the theater (the “white cube” and the“black box”)—remains with us today.14

Experimental Cinema (capital E, capital C, if you like) was distinguishingitself in much the same way during the same period. Though its history could betraced to the films of the European avant-garde of the 1920s, it only crystallized asa mode of film practice during the post-WWII period in places like New York, SanFrancisco, and London. This crystallization took place not only around key figuresand dominant critical discourses but around institutions as well: co-ops, exhibi-tion venues, journals, and structures of distribution and exhibition that continueto define the tradition. In short, experimental cinema was struggling for its iden-tity and independence just like the other young artistic movements of the 1960sand ’70s—at the very moment when the preoccupation with intermedia and artis-tic expansion seized the art world.

It might seem counterintuitive to subject expanded cinema to a categoriza-tion of the specific media and practices contained within it when it seems somanifestly about the subversion and disintegration of such categories. But a tax-onomy of expanded cinema recognizes what the more generalized andaccommodating conceptions cannot, such as the unique communities, criticalvocabularies, and institutions that constitute the histories of, say, experimentalcinema, video art, and alternative TV. Moreover, such a taxonomy does notrequire absolute, inflexible boundaries between art forms, nor does it need sys-tematic notions of the specificity of each relevant medium (e.g., film, video),though it must recognize that the discourses of specificity and independence

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14. For a discussion of this, see Jonathan Walley, “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde,” in Artand the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing/Afterall, 2008),pp. 182–99.

were certainly as significant to the art of the time as the ethic of expansion andboundary-breaking. In fact, the conception of expanded cinema I am proposingrecognizes the interplay between generality (in which differences among artforms dissolve) and specificity (where each art form’s distinctness and autonomyare asserted, explored, sustained): between expansion and contraction.

*

One way to address this distinction is in terms of the perceived relationshipbetween the art of cinema and the medium of film. The assumption that cinemaand film were identical—the former an art form embodied in the latter—was theidea that expanded cinema countered. Medium-specificity, then, is understood asbeing directly opposed to the inter-arts generality of expanded cinema, an opposi-tion mirrored in the other arts.

Throughout its history, however, experimental cinema had produced more-complicated meditations (in both theory and practice) on the nature of film andits relationship to the ontology of cinema. In this context, there were no simpledistinctions between a medium-specific film practice and expanded conceptionsof cinema. For example, the critic Deke Dusinberre suggested in 1975 that thematerialist emphasis of European experimental cinema was leading in an unex-pected direct ion: some filmmakers, scrut inizing film’s mater ials in theirinvestigations of cinema’s fundamental principles, had produced work that aban-doned the medium of celluloid film entirely. Dusinberre referred to AnthonyMcCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975), Tony Hill’s shadow performance PointSource (1973), and work by Valie Export and Peter Weibel. “A paradox emerges,”he wrote. “The very emphasis on the material nature of the cinema . . . leads toimmateriality.”15 Expanded cinema and materialist filmmaking, seemingly twoentirely opposite enterprises, were in fact interconnected.

Looking back on this period from a contemporary perspective, RosalindKrauss has argued that the medium-specific inclinations of experimental filmmak-ers in the 1960s produced a sophisticated ontological model—one that wassuggestive to other artists:

The rich satisfactions of thinking about film’s specificity at thatjuncture derived from the medium’s aggregate condition, onethat led a slightly later generation of theorists to define its sup-port with the compound idea of the “apparatus”—the mediumor support for film being neither the celluloid strip of theimages, nor the camera that filmed them, nor the beam of lightthat relays them to the screen, nor that screen itself, but all ofthese taken together, including the audience’s position caught

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15. Deke Dusinberre, “On Expanding Cinema,” Studio International 190 (Nov.–Dec. 1975), p. 224.

between the source of the light behind it and the image pro-jected before its eyes.16

In Krauss’s view, Structural film’s aim was one of “producing the unity of thisdiversified support in a single, sustained experience.”17 Krauss suggests thatStructural filmmakers demonstrated the interdependency of their medium’s com-ponent elements through the use of metaphors. For example, building uponMichelson’s seminal phenomenological analysis of Michael Snow’s Wavelength(1967), Krauss interprets that film as “an abstract spatial metaphor for film’s rela-tion to time.”18 This was a metaphor of “pure horizontal thrust” built out of thefilm’s famous forty-five-minute zoom-in, the illusory depth of the loft space, the“suspense” generated by the unfolding narrative action, and the slow rising of thesine wave on the soundtrack.19 This metaphor provided a unifying frameworkthrough which the viewer could apprehend the interdependence of the filmmedium’s elements. Snow’s own comments on his film support Krauss’s “appara-tus”-inflected interpretation:

I was thinking of planning for a time monument in which thebeauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinkingof trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space andtime, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact,” all about seeing. Thespace starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then ison the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).20

This conception of film as a network of interrelated components was far subtlerthan the reductive commonplace of modernist film criticism: that each Structuralor Structural-materialist film was simply “about the frame,” or “about flatness,” or“about flicker.”21

As Snow’s comments suggest, Krauss’s itemization of the distinct yet inter-connected components of film echoes a common tendency among experimentalfilmmakers and critics, particularly in the 1960s and ’70s (and later in writingthat makes reference to the films of that period). Attempts to isolate the

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16. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, pp. 24–25.17. Ibid., p. 25.18. Ibid., p. 26.19. Ibid.20. Snow, quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978, 2nd ed.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 375. 21. It should be noted that along with Michelson, P. Adams Sitney and Deke Dusinberre interpretedSnow’s film, and Structural film in general, in metaphorical terms of this sort. In both cases, themetaphoric interpretation counters the reductive, “literal” understanding of these films as beingabout nothing more than the film medium itself. Indeed, for Dusinberre, North American Structuralfilms like Snow’s solved a problem that confronted European Structural-materialist film: that a purelyreflexive, medium-specific aesthetic rendered films literally meaningless, unable to provide “any fur-ther insight into . . . processes of cognition and comprehension,” isolated in a “closed circle of pres-ence and self-reference.” See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, pp. 378–80, and Deke Dusinberre, “St.George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde,” Afterimage 6 (Summer 1976), pp. 14–15.

22. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1989), p. 243.23. Malcolm Le Grice, “Thoughts on Recent ‘Underground Film,’” Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972),p. 83. 24. Paul Sharits, “Words Per Page,” Film Culture 65–66 (1978), p. 37.

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medium-specific in film frequently produced laundry lists of film’s basic materialsand physical properties. This tendency is perhaps best represented by DavidJames’s account of Structural film, which, he argues:

variously emphasized the material nature of film and the separate stagesof the production process—from script, through editing and projection,to reception by the audience. Thus: flicker films . . . are about the opti-cal effects of rapidly alternating monochromatic frames; MichaelSnow’s Wavelength (1967), Back-Forth (1969) and La Region Centrale(1971) are about the effects of camera zoom, panning, and 360-degree rotation; Barry Gerson’s films are about the ambiguousspace between legibility and abstraction and thus draw attentionto the dependence of representation on focus, framing, cameraangle, and so forth. . . . And on through the list, it is possible tomap out a periodic table of all structural films, all possible struc-tural films, by posit ing a film constructed to manifest eachmoment in an atomized model of the entire cinematic process.22

The filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice mapped out just such a periodic table ofStructural films, including films based on “concerns which derive from the cam-era,” “concerns which derive from the editing process,” “concerns which derivefrom the physical nature of film,” “concern with duration as a concrete dimen-sion,” and “concern with the semantics of image and with the construction ofmeaning through language systems.”23 Paul Sharits’s essay “Words Per Page” mapsout an intensive study of film (a program of study he named “cinematics”) thatranged from emulsion grains and sprocket holes to “processes of intending tomake a film” and “processes of experiencing [a film].”24

What is striking about these “laundry lists” of uniquely filmic “elements” is nothow often such lists have been formulated, but how much they vary and how manydifferent types of elements they incorporate, ranging from the resolutely material(emulsion grains, sprocket holes, the shutter) to the elusively ephemeral (light, time,ideas, and spectatorial experience). One might expect the itemization of film-specificelements to be a simpler matter: just list the parts of the film stock, camera, and pro-jector, ident ifying these as the neutral mater ial ground upon which amedium-specific aesthetic can be based. But once a list of film’s specifics begins, itquickly proliferates—expands, in fact—suggesting, once more, that cinema is “alwaysalready expanded.” In doing so, these ontologies open up onto much more heteroge-neous conceptions of cinema than one would anticipate from a medium-specifictheory or practice. Sharits, for instance, closes his essay by stating, “It may be that in

‘limiting’ oneself to a passionate definition of an elemental, primary cinema, onemay find it necessary to construct systems involving either no projector at all or morethan one projector and more than one flat screen, and more than one volumetricspace between them.”25 And James’s “atomized model of the entire cinematicprocess” slides seamlessly from cameras, lenses, flicker, and framing to a “conceptualcinema,” much like Bazin’s myth of total cinema, existing in a primordial state in thepre-cinematic period of Muybridge and Marey.26

Within the world of experimental film, then, there was no easy distinctionbetween a medium-specific film practice and an expanded one, just as Dusinberreobserved. The atomized conception of film provided the basis for a body of workthat was expanded without losing its connection to the medium. Film, that is, washeterogeneous enough—“internally-differentiated,” to use Krauss’s term.27 Therecould be an expanded cinema that was, at the same time, distinctly filmic.

But where Krauss claims that the aim of Structural film was to unify themedium’s component parts, the expanded work of filmmakers like Sharits signalsa different path. Once film had been so “atomized,” filmmakers could intervene atany point in its table of elements; these elements could be multiplied (as in worksthat utilized multiple projectors and/or screens), rearranged, and/or replacedwith alternative materials. Filmmakers could even abandon certain elements com-pletely, the better to concentrate on the remaining ones, such as Sharits’s “systemsinvolving . . . no projector at all,” or Tony Conrad’s series of unprojectable filmobjects made by cooking, twisting, or hammering raw film stock. Rather than“producing the unity of this diversified support,” filmmakers working with thisatomized model produced its disunity, dismantling the medium, breaking theinterdependent elements of the apparatus apart and subjecting them to all man-ner of permutations to increase its diversity. Or, putting it a different way, it wasthe elemental conception of the film medium that unified these works, providingan abstract model that individual instances of expanded cinema could reference,even at many levels of remove. Indeed, the process could go as far as those filmlessworks by McCall and Hill that puzzled Dusinberre and referenced the physicalmedium conceptually or metaphorically.

Hollis Frampton’s idea of the “film machine” is one version of this expandedontology. Though he used the term in only one essay, “For a Metahistory of Film:Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” the idea reverberates through many of hisother writings. In Frampton’s view, film could not be reduced to the celluloidstrip, the camera, or the projector; it was, rather, the “sum” of all these thingstaken together:

We are used to thinking of camera and projector as machines, butthey are not. They are “parts.” The flexible filmstrip is as much a

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25. Ibid., p. 43.26. James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 243.27. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, p. 30.

“part” of the film machine as the projectile is part of a firearm. . . .Since all the “parts” fit together, the sum of all film, all projectors,and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine.28

Defining film in this way allowed Frampton to imagine a filmmaking process thatreplaced or simply removed some of the parts without sacrificing the resultingwork’s legibility as a film:

If filmstrip and projector are parts of the same machine, then “afilm” may be defined operationally as “whatever will pass through aprojector.” The least thing that will do that is nothing at all. Such afilm has been made. It is the only unique film in existence.29

The “only unique film in existence” to which Frampton referred was the com-poser Takehisa Kosugi’s performance piece Film and Film #4 (1965). In it, Kosugimade rectangular cuts of increasing size from a paper screen lit by the beam of anempty 16mm projector (starting with a small cut at the center of the screen andworking his way out until there was, in effect, no screen left, and the projector’sbeam hit the rear wall of the space). Though it employed no celluloid, Film and Film#4 makes very clear references to the material conditions of filmmaking. Its alterna-tions of white (the screen, the beam of light) and black (the darkened space, thegrowing hole in the screen), which Kosugi extended to the clothing he wore duringthe performance, invoke black-and-white photography, and positive and negativeimagery. The alternations made to the screen suggest such filmic elements as fram-ing, zooming, cutting (of course), and change over time.

In Frampton’s 1968 Hunter College lecture, an empty projector runs while atext by Frampton on the nature of film plays on a tape recorder at the front of thescreening space. During the lecture, the projectionist “makes” four films by insert-ing objects into the projector gate or by placing a hand or colored filter over thelens. “It seems that a film is anything that may be put into a projector that willmodulate the emerging beam of light,” Frampton wrote, once again alluding toKosugi’s piece.30

Al Wong’s Moon Light (1984), a “film installation with performer,” employedan empty projector, moonlight, sunlight, and fire to fill the installation space withlight and shadow. The performer used a mirrored disk to reflect light from thevarious sources around the space. Like Kosugi, Wong saw the interaction of lightand shadow in filmic terms, as positive and negative imagery.

Empty-projector performances like these represent one branch of a group ofexpanded works that collectively dismantle the “film machine,” displacing its compo-

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28. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” in On theCamera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), p. 137.29. Ibid.30. Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 127.

nents with substitute materials and actions. Here, celluloid film itself is replaced byanother object that modulates the projector beam: the performer him/herself. Thedistinction between film production and exhibition is thereby collapsed, a move thatwas characteristic of much materialist film and expanded cinema of the same period(particularly in Europe). Such works conceive “performance” in essentially cinematicterms, making it a fundamental ontological element of cinema rather than an alienform (i.e., “theater”). In so doing, they place film into a position of parity with therich and expansive field of performance-based art, but they also maintain an associa-tive link with the materials of film and the inherently filmic aesthetic qualities ortraits that medium-specific filmmaking favored.

Another group of expanded-cinema works inverted the empty-projector per-formance, retaining the filmstrip but eliminating every other component of the filmmachine, frequently rendering the strip unprojectable and thus necessitating alter-native modes of presentation. Among the best-known examples is the series of filmsthat Conrad produced from 1973 to 1975, which he made by subjecting filmstrips tosuch processes as frying, roasting, hammering, and electrocuting, making themunprojectable. Sharits and Peter Kubelka created installation versions of theirflicker films, including the former’s Ray Gun Virus (1966) and the latter’s ArnulfRainer (1960), in which the films were cut into strips of uniform length andmounted between Plexiglas. Conrad made a similar film object called Flicker Matte(1974), a “mat” (as in doormat or place mat) made by weaving together clear andopaque 16mm filmstrips, a joke on the flicker films he had produced in the previousdecade. Takahiko Iimura has recently revisited a series of film installations he pro-duced in the 1970s that were intended to reveal what he called “the film-system.”31Like Frampton, Iimura conceived of film as the sum total of interrelated elements,which he put on display in installation form. In 2007, he issued a limited edition oftwenty-four-frame (one second) strips of clear or opaque 16mm film spliced intotiny loops and encased in transparent plastic boxes.

These “film objects” are exhibited in ways that call to mind painting (theSharits and Kubelka films) or sculpture (Conrad and Iimura). But their makersconsistently described them in the language of experimental-film culture, some-times going so far as to explicitly distinguish them from other art forms. Conrad,for instance, saw his film objects as a logical endgame to the materialist practicesof contemporaneous experimental film,32 as well as an attempt to liberate film-makers from an unexamined reliance on (and therefore unwitting collusion with)the corporate manufacturers of film technology, such as Kodak.33 Employing non-temporal, “sculptural” forms, Conrad could radically extend the exploration of

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31. Takahiko Iimura, “On Film-Installation,” Millennium Film Journal 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 74–76.Also see Walley, “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde,” in Art and the Moving Image, p. 195. 32. Tony Conrad, “Is This Penny Ante or a High Stakes Game? An Interventionist Approach toExperimental Filmmaking,” Millennium Film Journal 43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005), pp. 103–104. 33. See Conrad’s statement in a piece entitled “Montage of Voices” in Millennium Film Journal16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986–87), pp. 256–57, and “Yellow Movies” in Tony Conrad: Yellow Movies, a cata-logue published by Galerie Daniel Buchholz and Greene Naftali Gallery, 2008, p. 22.

extreme duration that was characteristic of his work and that of many otherexperimental filmmakers of the period. Similarly, Iimura’s film boxes, like theinstallations with which they are associated, invoke a duality that shaped the workof a number of other filmmakers, including Sharits and Frampton: that film is atonce a static physical object and an ephemeral temporal experience. The loop,identified by Sitney as one of the four characteristics of Structural film, is a devicethat was used to extend—sometimes indefinitely—the duration of experimentalfilms and installations.34 But Iimura’s loops are so small they cannot be projected,a playful expansion on the loops’ indeterminate temporality that turns them intonon-temporal, static objects. The ephemerality of film in projection suggested bythe reference to looping meets the physicality of film-as-object.

Conrad’s film objects can be interpreted comically, as parodies of materialistfilmmaking practices that play with notions of “processing,” “chemistry,” “cutting,”etc., humorously substituting domestic activities like cooking and weaving for con-

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34. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 370.

Takahiko Iimura. One Second Loop (=Infinity): A White Line in Black. 2007.

ventional production and postproduction processes. But all of these film objects areironic, referencing the film machine and the conventional experience of film in pro-jection precisely by subverting and stubbornly resisting them. In this way, suchobjects represent cinema at its most expanded and most contracted. They are mater-ial(ist) to the point of objecthood, a contraction of cinema to a single physicalelement. But this degree of contraction results in a form that could be called “sculp-tural” (hence expanding cinema beyond the bounds of its conventional format) or“conceptual” (inasmuch as they are artifacts that call to mind other processes andexperiences not present in the works themselves—those of the film machine).

I will return to the notion of “conceptual” cinema, a phenomenon at the fur-thest reaches of cinema’s expansion in the 1960s and ’70s. To get there, however,requires looking at another variation of expanded cinema’s dismantling or reor-ganization of the film machine: the replacement of the “parts” of that machinewith alternative parts, a process of creative substitution that mobilized all sorts ofother materials in the creation of “cinema.” Just as any of film’s elements could beremoved, as in empty-projector performances or unprojectable film objects, ormultiplied, as in works using multiple screens and projectors, they could also beswapped out for other materials. These materials become legible as “cinematic”via a metaphorical association with the specific film elements they replace, anassociation made possible by the overarching notion of the “always already”

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Alan Berliner. Cine-Matrix. 1977.

expanded cinema: the heterogeneous, component ontology of film at large inexperimental-film culture.

Conrad and Alan Berliner both made variants of “paper films” (Berliner’sterm, it is in part a reference to the means by which early films were registeredwith the Library of Congress) in the 1970s.35 Conrad’s Yellow Movies series(1973–75) replaced both filmstrip and screen with a rectangular sheet of papercut to proportions of 1.33:1 (the pre-widescreen Academy ratio) and paintedwith cheap commercial house paint. Conrad referred to the paint as “emulsion”and the paper sheets as both “base” and “screen”; he claimed that the slow pho-tochemical changes that took place over decades, causing the white paint to turnyellow, constituted not only a production process but also each work’s “runningtime.” As a production professor at the University of Oklahoma from 1977 to1979, Berliner, rather than making traditional “projectable” films, produced aseries of cinematic works on paper, cardboard, and photographic scrolls. Theseinclude Cine-Matrix (1977), a grid of 156 images on pieces of cardboard, andThree Years (1978), a paper scroll made from three years’ worth of calendar pagestape-spliced end to end. “I never stopped thinking of myself as a filmmaker,”Berliner has said in reference to these works. “And, looking back, I still believethat not making films in Oklahoma ultimately made me a better filmmaker.”36

These works eliminate the need for a projector, but another strain of expandedcinema replaces the projector with specialized, nonstandard projection machines,usually fashioned by the filmmakers themselves. The best-known example of this isKen Jacobs’s Nervous System, which Jacobs has used in live-projection performancessince the early 1970s. The Nervous System is made from two synchronized 16mmanalytic projectors fitted with a giant external “shutter” (like a whirling fan blade).The two projectors are loaded with identical film prints, aimed at the same spot onthe screen (rather than side by side as in other multi-projector films), and run in syn-chronization, the external shutter alternately blocking the light of one and allowingthe light from the other to pass. Jacobs loads each projector so that the two filmprints are a few frames apart. This results in slight differences between the twoimages the projectors cast onto the screen. The rapid, flickering alternation of twoslightly varied images creates a pronounced 3-D effect without the need for specialglasses, a phenomenon Jacobs has explored further with his Nervous Magic Lantern,constructed in the early 1990s. Unlike the Nervous System, Nervous Magic Lanternperformances utilize no film. Transparencies and objects are placed between abright light source and an assortment of lenses, producing three-dimensionalmoving images with the aid of an external shutter similar to that of the NervousSystem.37 As early as 1965, Jacobs began working with 3-D shadow play as a type of

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35. See Scott MacDonald’s interview with Berliner in his A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews withIndependent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 157–58.36. Ibid., p. 157.37. For further descriptions of the workings of the Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern (thelatter of which Jacobs had previously been secretive about), see Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed.Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 273.

cinematic practice (one that didn’t require nearly the outlay of capital that conven-tional filmmaking did). He has referred to such work, which evolved into theNervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances, as “paracinema.”38 “Anequivalent cinema,” Jacobs has explained, “created by other than filmic means or byusing film in other than standard ways; equivalent, or parallel to, is what I had meantto convey.”39 This idea of equivalency is another expression of the relationshipbetween the film machine—the medium in its familiar, conventional state—andworks of expanded cinema that dispense with some or all of that machine’s partswithout losing a connection to it.

A variant of this strain of expanded cinema combines standard film projectionwith additional devices that modulate the projector beam or directly affect the film-strip. In David Dye’s Western Reversal (1973), the filmmaker projects a reel from a1950s Western through a device consisting of sixteen tiny, movable mirrors, breakingthe onscreen image into a grid of sixteen separate frames that can be shifted aboutindividually. Dye moves each square around the screen like so many puzzle pieces,first dismantling the image then reconstituting it, a process that he must completebefore the reel ends. Another example might be Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time (1973),also a projection performance, in which an enormous film loop passed through botha projector and a sewing machine (operated by Nicolson). The filmstrip was dottedwith more and more perforations with each pass through the loop, producing anincreasingly abstract image and eventually weakening the strip to the point that itbroke, bringing the performance to an end.

Another group of works retain conventional projection but employ alternativescreens. A number of practitioners of expanded cinema explored steam, haze,clouds, etc., as surfaces for projection, as in Stan VanDerBeek’s Steam Screens (1969),Anthony McCall’s “solid light” films (e.g., Line Describing a Cone [1973] and ConicalSolid [1974]), and Liz Rhodes’s Light Music (1975). Still others incorporated thehuman body into their work as a kind of screen, as in Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film#1 (1971), in which the filmmaker stands between a bank of 16mm projectors andthe screen and interacts with both the projected imagery and his own multiple shad-ows. Tapp und Tast Kino (Touch Cinema, 1968), a notorious expanded-cinemaperformance by Valie Export and Peter Weibel, explored the political resonances ofthe “body as screen,” fiercely critiquing the film industry’s use of images of female

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38. The term “paracinema” has been used to refer to expanded-cinema works, such as Jacobs’s,Berliner’s, and Conrad’s, that entirely abandon the elements of the film medium with alternative mate-rials. It has frequently been employed by Ken Jacobs, who seems to have been the first to use it, alongwith Larry Gottheim, as a faculty member at SUNY Binghamton in the 1970s. In addition to Jacobs,Gottheim, and Berliner, the filmmakers Barry Gerson, Kerry Laitala, and Bradley Eros have used theterm to describe their expanded work. See Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea ofCinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” October 103 (Winter 2003),pp. 15–30. For the first use of the term in print (as far as I have been able to determine), see LindleyHanlon, “Kenneth Jacobs, Interviewed by Lindley Hanlon (Jerry Sims Present), April 9, 1974,” FilmCulture 67–69 (1979), pp. 65–86.39. Ken Jacobs, “Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows of Evanescent Cinema,” Millennium Film Journal43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005), p. 40.

Valie Export and Peter Weibel. Tapp und Tast Kino. 1968.Courtesy Charim Galerie, Vienna.

sexuality to reproduce and reinforce ideological norms governing that sexuality.In this performance, Export wore a cardboard box over her naked torso, as Weibelencouraged onlookers to reach into the box (understood as a miniature movietheater, complete with a set of makeshift curtains at the front) to touch Export’sbare breasts.

Export and Weibel’s expanded-cinema performances and installations consti-tute a veritable catalogue of possibilities in the disintegration and displacement ofthe film machine and of the implications of the varied new forms expanded cin-ema could take—performative, sculptural, painterly. Export and Weibel negotiatedbetween the pure physical materiality of the film medium and reality in the spiritof “the mixing of art and life” that was practically the definition of expanded art.But they did so without sacrificing a connection to film’s specificity. Their work alsoillustrates how filmmakers could continue to assert the autonomy of their art formwithout cutting it off from the other arts. Export has stated that her use of naturalmaterials such as water, light, and the body created “unexpected and yet funda-mentally illuminating connections with minimal art, land art, arte povera.”40

Export has described her works with Weibel as constituting a large-scale projectof “breaking up” the “commercial-conventional sequence of filmmaking—shooting,editing . . . and projection.”41 Their work often eliminated these elements of themedium, which were “replaced by reality in order to install new signs of thereal.”42 She writes:

The expansion of our film work proceeded initially from thematerial concept; thus the “illusion” film was transformed intothe material film, and in this way the foundations of the film medi-um were reflected. . . . The formal arrangement of the elementsof film, whereby elements are exchanged or replaced by others—for example, electric light by fire, celluloid by reality, a beam oflight by rockets—had an effect which was artistically liberatingand yielded a wealth of new possibilities, such as film installationsand the film-environment. In the production of the film medi-um, celluloid is only one aspect that could (also) be deleted.43

Two examples of Export’s “deletion” of filmic elements, and her “exchange” ofthese for others, are Abstract Film No. 1 (1967–68) and Instant Film (1968). The formerfeatured flashlight beams casting light on mirrors covered in various liquids, whichreflected the light onto a nearby screen. The latter was simply a piece of transparentPVC foil, which Export has referred to as “screen, projector, and camera all in one”44

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40. Valie Export, “Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality,” Senses of Cinema 28 (September/October2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ 2003/28/expanded_cinema/ (accessed May 9, 2011).41. Ibid.42. Ibid.43. Ibid.44. Ibid.

and which could be used by the “spectator” in any number of ways—displayed on awall, cut or perforated and peered through, etc.

It should also be noted that Export combines two different meanings of“material” in her phrase “material film.” Though the work is rooted in the mater-ial—as in literal, physical—elements of the film medium, the replacement ofthese with real bodies and actions rather than illusory ones leads to another kindof “materialist” cinema. “Material,” in this sense of the word, extends beyond theraw materials of film technology to the routinized practices and institutions offilmmaking, exhibition, and spectatorship that had coalesced over seventy years ofcinema history. Hence, Export and Weibel’s expanded cinema was intended asmuch as an intervention into the dominant patterns of cinema spectatorship as itwas as an investigation of film’s medium-specificity. The attack “on the continuityof the phases of production,” Export claimed, “robs the production companies oftheir conventional success.”45

What’s more, Export extends the project of dismantling the film machineinto a temporal dimension. That is, the component elements of the medium areunderstood as not only spatially discrete (projector here, screen there, etc.), but astemporally discrete as well: first the filmstrip is exposed in the camera, thenprocessed, edited, and finally projected. The temporality of production and exhi-bition could be altered—expanded or contracted—in the same manner as theindividual parts of the machine. By this logic, the long duration of works likeWarhol’s Empire (1964) or McCall’s twenty-four-hour installation Long Film forAmbient Light (1975) greatly expand one temporal “phase” of film productionand/or exhibition (the extreme duration Conrad attributed to his Yellow Moviesand film objects is another, more radical example). Similarly, live film-based per-formances such as Kosugi’s, Le Grice’s, and Export and Weibel’s contract normally

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45. Ibid.

Export. Abstract Film No. 1.1967–68. Courtesy CharimGalerie, Vienna.

Tony Hill. Point Source. 1973.

distinct phases into a single moment: the viewer experiences simultaneously the“making” and “viewing” of the work.

Such was also the case in Conrad’s Film Feedback (there were at least tworealizations in 1974), a private performance that merged the processes of imagemaking, chemical processing, and projection. Conrad made the film with a teamof students dispersed through three rooms: a projection booth with a large win-dow, a screening room facing the booth on the other side of the window, and asmall room next to the booth. In the projection booth, in place of a projector,was a 16mm camera aimed at the screen in the screening room. A small lightedcandle sat in front of the screen, with a projector placed behind it for rear-screen projection. Under normal shooting circumstances, the camera wouldhave been closed to prevent the film inside from being exposed to light. In thiscase, however, the projector booth was darkened, allowing the back of the cam-era to be left off so that the film passed out of the camera (running at fiveframes per second), over a series of rollers, and under the door to the adjacentroom. In this room, also darkened, the exposed film was passed one foot at atime through a tray of developer, another of fixer, wiped off, then run over asecond series of rollers into the screening room, where it was fed into the rear-screen projector. As the images began to appear on the screen, the camera inthe projection booth recorded them and the process began again. The resultwas a feedback loop of nested images of the candle and screen; it can be viewednow as a 16mm print—an artifact of the filming/processing/viewing experiencethat made up the performance.

Export’s idea of the “exchange” of film and reality, and the projects she andWeibel made that enacted this idea, reveal just how far expanded cinema’s disintegra-tion and/or displacement of the film machine could go. The result could be“material” or “filmic” works that eliminated every component of the medium with-out , however, losing their associat ion with that medium. Jacobs’s shadowplays—those works he named “paracinema”—are one instance of a completely film-less expanded cinema. Works like these have been described as reducing cinema toessentials like light and time, but in fact they maintain deeper and more complexassociative links with the film machine. McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light, a twenty-four-hour installation consisting of nothing more than a loft space, a bare lightbulb,and diffused windows, was described by its maker in terms of its relationship to the“customary photochemical and electro-mechanical processes” and the “presupposi-tions behind film as an art activity.”46 In Tony Hill’s 1973 performance Point Source,the filmmaker shines an intense point-source light through an assortment of house-hold objects, casting massive shadows onto the surrounding walls (the piece issometimes performed in a film theater, other times in galleries). Hill identifies his

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46. Anthony McCall, “Two Statements,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed.P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), pp. 253–54.

non-filmic materials in filmic terms: “a small bright light is the projector, severalobjects are the film and the whole room is the screen.”47

The logical next step in this process (allowing that the logic of the expandedarts was highly creative and idiosyncratic) would be to substitute the material compo-nents of the film machine for the idea of these components. Dusinberre referred toExport and Weibel’s work as having taken the fundamental first principles of cinema“out of their specifically filmic context” to deal with them “conceptually” (e.g., theidea of “projection”).48 If the parts of the film machine could be replaced by othermaterials, including reality itself, then concepts could serve as equally acceptablereplacements, resulting in a “cinema” that was purely conceptual—a mental or,maybe, a discursive form. Conrad’s Yellow Movies could be taken as one example, astrange cross between a resolutely material “film object” and a conceptual film. WhileConrad made explicit associations between the paint and paper he used and the cus-tomary materials of photography, he has also described these works as imaginary;their extreme duration—still “screening” after nearly 40 years—means that ourdirect contact with them is so brief compared to their actual running times that themajority of our contemplation of the Yellow Movies takes place in the imagination.49

In a major reconsideration of Structural film written ten years after its hey-day, Paul Arthur claimed that this act of “exploding the fixed boundaries ofimage-duration” was a central feature of experimental film’s exploration of alter-native modes of film-viewer relations.50 For Arthur, Warhol’s Empire was, likeConrad’s paracinema, a landmark in the history of this process. That film’sextreme duration encouraged “fragmentary contact” between viewer and film, sothat the experience of the film was as much imagined as real. Moreover, “the formand image-content of the film are so immediately open to paraphrastic statementthat one can construct a distinct impression of what its experience entails.”51 Andby the time Arthur wrote his essay, Empire (like all of Warhol’s films) had beenremoved from circulation by its maker and was thus only accessible at a level ofremove—through descriptions, analyses, and interpretations. Indeed, accordingto Arthur, the film’s “existence as an imagined object in consciousness has becomeits essential condition, its locus of meaning and influence.”52 Though one mightobject to Arthur’s claims on the grounds that Warhol’s films were never as simplis-tic and “minimal” as the discourse addressing them (and replacing them) saidthey were, Arthur was correct that the films exerted influence more through dis-course—word of mouth, critical writings, theoretical abstractions—than through

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47. Hill, “Tony Hill Films, Point Source,” http://www.tonyhillfilms.com/films (accessed May 10, 2011).48. Dusinberre, “On Expanding Cinema,” p. 220.49. Tony Conrad, “Yellow Movie 2/16–26/73 (1973),” audio file, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/53/1024 (accessed May 1, 2011).50. Paul Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact,” Millennium Film Journal1/2 (Spring 1978), p. 12.51. Ibid., p. 5.52. Ibid.

actual encounters with the film in projection. Hence, Arthur refers to Empire’s“de-centering and emptying not only of image-content and means but of projec-tion as the ontological requirement for film’s status as artifact,” and concludes,“At last, the first conceptual film.”53

The term “conceptual film” has been used to describe films made byConceptual artists, often to document performances or events that could not oth-erwise be reproduced. Arthur’s usage, however, suggests a film that exists solely asa mental entity and which therefore can only take the form of thoughts or words.This usage, though more obscure than the others, was not uncommon during theperiod of which Arthur writes. The idea of a “conceptual cinema,” existing asintention, belief, thought, or discourse, appears in various forms throughout the1960s and ’70s and has been consolidated by more recent scholarship onStructural and related film, including that of Arthur and David James. Jamesargues that Structural film’s

search for an entirely literal film language . . . goes further andfurther back through the archaeology of early cinema, past thereflexive audience confrontation and the movable shot in TheGreat Train Robbery, past the almost schematic analysis of illusionin Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, and so to the premonitionof Warhol in the earliest preserved film, John Rice—May Irwin Kiss.Eventually the search falls away in the filmstrips of Muybridge, inthe enumeration of the components of a possible cinema, and inthe speculations in which the idea of film was first broached, thefirst conceptual film created.54

By this logic, Structural films and expanded works, in different ways, mirrorthe earliest ideas of the possibility of cinema, crystallizing these concepts into amore recognizable form. This notion that the avant-garde cinema of the 1960sand ’70s restarted film history, often by going back to the period of pre-cinema tomine the territory of “the idea of film,” was a creatively generative one for a num-ber of filmmakers and an important interpretive schema for many critics. Duringthe initial explosion of expanded-cinema activity in New York and San Francisco,for instance, Jonas Mekas produced the following paean to the “dream” of cinemain his Village Voice column:

We are only one step from the absolute cinema, cinema of ourmind. For what is cinema really, if not images, dreams, andvisions? We take one more step, and we give up all movies and webecome movies: We sit on a Persian or Chinese rug smoking onedream matter or another and we watch the smoke and we watchthe images and dreams and fantasies that are taking place right

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53. Ibid., p. 6.54. James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 242.

there in our eye’s mind: we are the true cineasts, each of us, cross-ing space and time and memory—this is the ultimate cinema ofthe people, as it has been for thousands and thousands of years.This is all real! There are no limits to man’s dreams, fantasies,desires, visions. It has nothing to do with technological innova-tions: It has to do with the boundless spirit of man, which cannever be confined to screens, frames, or images. It jumps out ofany matter of any dream imposed upon it, and seeks its own mys-teries and its own dreams.55

An undated, unrealized piece called “Blackout,” described on a note card inthe Hollis Frampton file at Anthology Film Archives, makes comic reference toexperimental film’s demand for mentally active and participatory spectators, anidea transposed into physical activity in real space in installations like McCall’s,Iimura’s, and Export’s. The card reads:

Scene from new Arlis Grampton film, “Blackout,” in whichGrampton graphically demonstrates his theory of “cerebral cine-ma” by pulling plug out of projector and allowing audience to sitin dark, silent room for 2-and-a-half hours. Audience is thusobliged to fall back on own resources rather than relying on imag-ination of an individual we designate as a “filmmaker” to enter-tain us. Audience members at first react by thinking “There is nomovie,” but gradually come to realize through Grampton’s subtleartistry the obvious fact that “the movie” is and always has beenwhat is going on in their own minds.

It is likely that “Blackout” was written by someone other than Frampton andgiven to the filmmaker, perhaps as a playful homage.56 But it resonates withFrampton’s belief, elaborated more fully in his extensive theoretical writings, thatcinema was as much a conceptual phenomenon as anything else—the product ofthe mind, not just the medium. Some of these writings read like an avant-gardereimagining of Bazin’s “The Myth of Total Cinema.”

Frampton, writing a couple of decades later and in the midst of a periodof radically expansive ontological thinking, took Bazin’s creative historicism toan extreme, claiming cinema as an ancient art form first manifested in music(and, with a sweeping reductiveness characteristic of his writing, Framptontraced the history of music back to the sounds of insects—organized sound for

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55. Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, p. 146.56. According to Marion Faller, Frampton’s widow, “Blackout” was probably “not Frampton’s butan ‘homage’ that he kept.” She adds that the index card “was originally attached, in the lower leftcorner, to a sheet of black construction paper. My assumption is that the piece dates from some timeafter ‘A Lecture’ (Oct 1968).” Marion Faller, email to author, June 21, 2011. Ken Eisenstein, who hasdone significant research on Frampton and to whom I am grateful for making me aware of“Blackout,” concurs.

the purposes of expression).57 In “For a Metahistory of Film,” he proposes an“infinite cinema”:

A polymorphous camera has always turned, and will turn forever,its lens focused upon all the appearances of the world. Before theinvention of still photography, the frames of the infinite cinemawere blank . . . then a few images began to appear upon the end-less ribbon of film. Since the birth of the photographic cinema,all the frames are filled with images. . . . A still photograph is sim-ply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.58

This creative historicism is one more example of a kind of theorizing that enabledand explained expanded cinema, a theorizing wherein cinema is an idea manifestacross a plurality of forms that are imagined by contemporary experimental film-makers in the terms of the film medium (Frampton’s “polymorphous camera” and“endless ribbon of film”). That is, despite the “polymorphous” nature of cinema,its specificity is protected against loss amidst a limitlessly heterogeneous field byreference to its “home” medium of film and the major animating concepts ofexperimental-film culture. Further defense of cinema’s specificity is provided bythe historical reversal Frampton proposes; though the motion pictures were pre-dated by still photography, a state of affairs reflected in Frampton’s own artisticcareer, film, by this way of thinking, exists before photography.

And before every other art form, as well. In a 1973 letter to Donald Richie, thencurator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Frampton wrote, “I ven-ture to suggest that a time may come when the whole history of art will become nomore than a footnote to the history of film . . . or of whatever evolves from film.”59

*

The categories of expanded cinema I have surveyed—cinema as perfor-mance, as object, as concept, as any alternative material that could serve asprojector, filmstrip, screen, etc.—are unified by the elemental conception of thefilm machine that has come out of the ontological thrust of experimental cinemaacross its history. Film in its conventional form is thus placed in a privileged posi-tion vis-à-vis expanded cinema. The “film machine” becomes the central referencepoint for the expanded works I have discussed, as do the aesthetic qualities ortraits that that machine represents (those kinds of sensory and cognitive experi-ences that have been privileged in experimental-film practice and discourse, suchas those produced by flickering, or editing, or flatness). In retaining allusions tothe film medium in its conventional state, such works extend the medium-specificinvestigations of materialist film even though they take on apparently hybrid

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57. Hollis Frampton, “Hollis Frampton: Three Talks at Millennium,” Millennium Film Journal16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986–87), pp. 277 and 292.58. Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film,” p. 134.59. Hollis Frampton, “Letter to Donald Richie,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, p. 160.

forms, even the immaterial or “dematerialized” ones of paracinema. Hence, whilecertainly “expansive,” expanded cinema resisted the loss of film’s identity amongintermedia practices and hybridity. It allowed filmmakers to negotiate betweenthe strict limitations of medium-specificity and the completely open field ofexpanded-arts possibilities.

The last two decades have seen a new environment of intermedia practicesand ideas emerge, and with it the familiar vexations for cinema’s identity andindependence. The spread of digital technology and attendant notions of mediaconvergence, the so-called “death” of film (especially small-gauge film), the pre-dominance of moving-image art in the gallery, and the increasing emphasis oninterdisciplinarity and skepticism about medium-specificity among cinema-studiesacademics—all these mark a new period in the history of cinema’s ongoing expan-sion and raise familiar questions about the nature and future of the art form.

Once again, experimental cinema finds itself in a unique position relative tothese historical developments. The cautionary tone Michelson sounded in 1966 isbeing echoed by contemporary filmmakers and critics. For example, writing in2003, the artist and critic Barry Schwabsky argued that the art world’s fascinationwith cinema actually contributed to experimental film’s marginalization:

. . . What has been peculiar about this recuperation of art’s rela-tion to film is that, in terms of the “film” or “cinema” part of theequation, it has consistently sidelined the kinds of film that wouldon the face of it appear most relevant to late-modern and contem-porary artistic practice—that is, the various forms of avant-garde,experimental, poetic, materialist and structuralist cinema thathave eschewed the conventions of the narrative feature. Instead,the focus has been precisely on narrative features, primarily ofthe Hollywood variety, secondarily those that arose in the wake ofthe Nouvelle Vague—the cinema of Godard, Antonioni,Fassbinder and so on.60

The description of a recent symposium on the relationship between art and filmexpressed a similar sentiment: “even today the experimental film has been unableto develop its own discursive power within the gravitational fields of art and cin-ema.”61 That is, the merging of art and film—in the contemporary moment as inthe 1960s and ’70s—poses a threat to the identity and vitality of experimental cin-ema. The situation demands that experimental-film culture find a way to seize“discursive power” and assert itself in the world of moving-image art, new media,and media convergence.

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60. Barry Schwabsky, “Art, Film, Video: Separation or Synthesis?,” in The Undercut Reader, p. 2.61. From the description of the symposium “From Close and Afar: The Interweaving of Art andCinema Around 1970,” Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, http://www.museenkoeln.de/museum-ludwig/default.asp?s=3045 (accessed May 1, 2011).

Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder. Light Spill. 2007.Image courtesy Robischon Gallery.

Expanded cinema, I have suggested, was a way for experimental filmmakersto do just that in the 1960s and ’70s. Not surprisingly, then, a new surge ofexpanded cinematic practices have appeared in the experimental-film world, ashas scholarly interest in historical Expanded Cinema and the question of the rela-tionship between experimental film and the other arts. Without abandoning themult imedia, non-specific conception of expanded cinema at the heart ofYoungblood’s still crucial book, it seems to me, to say “expanded cinema” today isto refer specifically to the kind of work I have discussed here, which is still beingproduced by contemporary self-designated experimental filmmakers. Such work,while “expanded,” has nonetheless been informed by narrower conceptions of thespecifically cinematic, though not so narrow as to frame out inter-arts referencesand intermedia forms. This is because the question of the nature and possibilitiesof the specifically cinematic has become all the more urgent given the historicalcircumstances.

In the wake of digital media’s ascendency, the “dismantling” of the filmmachine may no longer be an artistically generative metaphor for expanded cin-ema, but a reality that threatens an entire art ist ic tradit ion. In response,contemporary expanded cinema has emphasized and celebrated film as a stillviable alternative to digital that needs to be protected from extinction.62 Oneform this response continues to take is the creative reimagining of film in such away that it can absorb other art forms, or at least interact with them while retain-ing its legibility as film. About their film installation Light Spill (2006), in whichhundreds of feet of decommissioned 16mm film footage is dumped onto thegallery floor by a projector with no takeup reel, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoderwrite of “the art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art.That is the coming attraction for us.”63 Like Frampton, Gibson and Recoder sug-gest a reversal of the history and the logic of cinema in the house of art. Theongoing expansion of cinema, including its exploration of the territory of the artworld, need not be seen as a “crisis” in the art of film, but as a means for experi-mental film to resolve the multiple crises it faces in the new millennium.

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62. For more on this, see Jonathan Walley, “Not an Image of the Death of Film,” in Expanded Cinema:Art, Performance, Film, ed. David Curtis, A.L. Ress, Duncan White, and Steven Ball (London: TatePublishing, forthcoming 2011).63. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, “Artist Statement: Light Spill,” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Department Web site, http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/arthistory/exhibits/2011/lightspill_0111.cfm (accessed May 5, 2011).

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