Incite No1

MANIFEST >> Edited by Brett Kashmere

+ www.incite-online.net

incite!journal of experimental media & radical aesthetics

journal of experimental media & radical aesthetics

Issue Number One: Manifest - Fall 2008/Spring 2009Covers designed and printed by Leslie TopnessPoster version of Michael Betancourt’s “_______ Manifesto” designed by Amy Giovanna Rinaldi and Eliza Koch

Editor Brett KashmereManaging Editor Jonathan ComeauArt Director Peter Nowogrodzki

E-mail: [email protected]: http://www.incite-online.net

INCITE! is a new publication dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media. Merging handmade and online platforms, this hybrid journal addresses the lack of critical attention afforded film and media artists working today. In addition to scholarly articles, INCITE! publishes aesthetic statements, manifestos, artist projects, multiples, archival documents, interviews, reviews, and hastily drawn plans. Stationing ourselves at the cross-flow of research, scholarship, and creation, we encourage personal writing, critical poetics, and radical approaches to film and media.

Articles and media can be submitted at any time. We accept unsolicited pieces; however, it is a good idea to advise us first of an article idea or media work, receive our feedback and then proceed. Submissions may be sent as email attachments (in MS Word or RTF), to [email protected].

Copyright lies with the individual authors and artists. All views expressed in this journal are those of the authors and artists, not the editors (unless indicated).

The production of INCITE! is supported by Oberlin College and was catalyzed by the formerSyracuse Experimental (Film & Media Workshop).

Printed in Pittsburgh, USA by Kreider Printing.

______ / 300

incite!

5 Brett Kashmere Where Are We Now?

Dossier :: The Life, Death, and Life of Film

9 Rick Hancox Film – Is There a Future in Our Past? (The Afterlife of Latent Images) 20 Gerda Cammaer Film: Another Death, Another Life 33 Carl Brown AFTER: A Beginner’s Guide to Alchemy

38 Richard Kerr The Aesthetic WOW!41 Scott MacKenzie ‘Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible,’ or, A Secret History of Film Manifestos45 Jonas Mekas Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto 47 Association for Film Art Manifesto50 The League Manifesto 52 Atelier national du Manitoba The Horizontalist Manifesto / Les Horizontalistes: manifeste56 Solomon Nagler Winnipeg Eats Itself: L’Atelier national du Manitoba's Scheme for Sovereignty 65 Leslie Supnet Hand Cranked VHS 67 Double Negative Manifesto 69 Brett Kashmere Against the Current: A Two-Part Interview with Karl Lemieux (and Daïchi Saïto)89 Syracuse Experimental There’s More to Filmmaking than Making Films91 Regina Muff Thus Spake Zarathustra97 Dumba Mission Statement / Manifesta 99 Scott Berry Brooklyn Babylon Cinema101 Georgette Nicolaides The Good/Bad Art Collective of Denton, Texas 104 Steve Polta Masochism of the Margins: An Interview with Craig Baldwin 125 Kenneth White Directions of Encounter 128 Clint Enns light is the first bodily form 131 Ryan Tebo RAMers generation manifest142 Peter Nowogrodzki The Pesto Manifesto

Notes on Contributors

Artist Multiple

Michael Betancourt ____________ Manifesto

table of contents

Online FILM FARM 1994-2006: Films, Excerpts & Video Diaries

Featuring work by Chris Chong, David Gatten, Eve Heller, Sarah Lightbody, Deirdre

Logue, Cara Morton, and Jennifer Reeves. Compiled by Philip Hoffman.

where are we now?brett kashmere

Where are we–the Underground? >> Jonas Mekas

In the 60s they said it was underground but it wasn’t. Now nobody says anything and it really is. >> Stan Brakhage

When Jonas Mekas posed his question at the June 1966 commencement exercises of the

Philadelphia College of Art1 the American avant-garde cinema was approaching the end of its

halcyon era. Though the next twenty years would shepherd the expansion of structural film

practice; the explosive emergence of feminist counter-cinemas; the development of avant-

gardes in Canada, Britain, Poland and so on; as well as the surfacing of minority cinemas;

the flowering of gender and identity politics; and the introduction of video art and projected

installation; subsequent decades are often perceived as a period of declining returns. As Paul

Arthur points out, by the mid-1980s experimental film was considered to be “in a state of pro-

found crisis.”2 Many prominent critics, including P. Adams Sitney, Noël Carroll, Fred Camper,

and J. Hoberman came out with declarations to that effect. “The dominant movements of the

last two decades appear to have either exhausted themselves or ground to a halt,” wrote Carroll

in 1985.3 In his consciously polemical salvo, “The End of the Avant-Garde,” published in

1987, Camper affirmed, “It is no longer a revolutionary act to scratch on film or use asynchronous

sound.”4 Arthur attributed the demise of vitality to the power of television. The crisis reached

its tipping point during the 1989 International Experimental Film Congress, held in Toronto.

Angered by what they perceived to be a hijacking of official history, an institutionalization

of the avant-garde canon, a dominance of technological values, and ignorance of linguistic,

sexual, and cultural difference, 76 film and videomakers from across Canada and the U.S.

signed a manifesto condemning the Congress. “Let’s set the record straight,” as it was titled,

ends with a customary formulation: “The Avant-Garde is dead; long live the avant-garde.”5

incite! issue one 5

Without the pretense of a comprehensive overview, and acknowledging the shifts,

overlaps, and complexities of history, from this perspective it seems that avant-garde cinema/

alternative media has reached another transitional moment. Stan Brakhage’s death in February

2003 is the clearest symbol of this generational changeover.6 Still, there are deep continuities

in the realms of production, exhibition, and distribution that link the movement’s past and

current incarnations. In the words of Paul Valery, “Everything changes except the avant-

garde.” True to form, the past decade has witnessed an amazing resurgence in alternative film

and video activity. A new generation of media artists born in the 70s, including Jeremy Bailey,

Daniel Barrow, Christina Battle, Aleesa Cohene, Glen Fogel, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder,

hooliganship, Xander Marro, Shana Moulton, Paper Rad, Seth Price, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof,

Tasman Richardson, Michael Robinson, Ben Russell, among many others, has begun to

receive public recognition and acclaim. Operating within and around a framework of artist

collectives, microcinemas, community supports, and independent distribution channels, and

striving to integrate experimental film and video with other art forms like performance,

sculpture, music, and drawing, these independent twenty- and thirty-somethings are making

a significant contribution to the diversity and growth of experimental media in North America.

However, in a recent interview with Scott MacDonald, the pioneering avant-garde

historian P. Adams Sitney questions why “none of the young people associated with this

phenomenon seem to want to write about it,” underlining that “all this work exists in what

seems to be a vacuum.”7 While many of today’s new generation of film and videomakers

screen regularly in traditional experimental venues such as Anthology Film Archives, San

Francisco Cinematheque, the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, Cinema-

theque Ontario, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Images Festival, and the Los

Angeles Filmforum, these artists are seldom written about in the pages of our art and film

journals, where still active veterans and projected image gallerists garner the lion’s share of

the press. The lack of critical attention afforded this rising wave, combined with a confluence

of new publications on avant-garde histories, have brought Sitney’s point into sharper focus.8

Those daring spirits who continue to make it new in the artisanal, non-commercial traditions

of experimental film and video have been left with fewer instruments of analysis and publicity.

The purpose of this journal is to explore divergent approaches (academic, cura-

torial, journalistic, critical, creative) to writing on experimental cinema and media art in all

6 incite! issue one

its current forms. In attempting to address the contemporary scene and its historical ante-

cedents, we have collected manifestos, articles, films, videos, documentation, drawing,

personal essays, ephemera, and interviews, which, separately and together, manifest a/many

beginning/s. Besides providing a forum for formal and informal scholarship on contemporary

experimental media and radical aesthetics, our intention is to reflect upon the development

of North America’s film and video vanguards, acknowledging the contributions of many

prescient, though still under-appreciated, practitioners. And, to extend a bridge between

that history and the current moment, bringing to light the revolutionary innovations of film

and video makers at the cutting edge of artistic activity today. Our primary ambition through-

out the following pages–and future issues–is to establish continuity (and contingency) between

the initial emergence of an underground cinema and its current evolution, by situating the

present and the past in dialogue with one another. Following the American poet Charles

Olson, we believe that there is no actuality as the past, that history exists only as one invokes

it in the present.

Now, then…

Notes

1. Jonas Mekas, “Where Are We Now–The Underground?,” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1967), p. 18.

2. Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 151. The final chapter of Arthur’s book, titled “‘I Just Pass My Hands over the Surface of Things’: On and Off the Screen, circa 2003,” has been an inspiration for this introduction, and for the founding of this journal.

3. Noël Carroll, “Film,” in The Postmodern Moment, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg (Westport, CT: Green-wood Press, 1985), p. 127.

4. Fred Camper, “The End of the Avant-Garde,” Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986-87): 121.

5. Caroline Avery et al, “Let’s set the record straight” (1989), http://xalrazutis.org/alchemists/visual_alchemy/manifesto/congress.html

6. As I write this, I am saddened by the news of Bruce Conner’s passing (on July 7, 2008). Among other things, Conner was a key contributor to the development of avant-garde film practice, the post-war counter-culture, and the founding of Canyon Cinema as a film distributor.

incite! issue one 7

7. P. Adams Sitney quoted in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 35.

8. See, for instance, Scott MacDonald’s Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (2002) and Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (2008); Paul Arthur’s A Line of Sight: The American Avant-Garde Since 1965 (2004); David James’ The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (2004); Sitney’s updated edition of Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002); Duncan Reekie’s Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (2007); and so on. Together, these publications (unwittingly) construct the movement as a closed field.

8 incite! issue one

film-is there a future in our past?

rick hancox

Is film dead, or are rumours of its death–as in Mark Twain’s response to the gaffe about

his own demise–“greatly exaggerated”? Rumours of film kicking the bucket are nothing

new–“FILM IS DEAD” was a banner headline in Daily Variety in 1956 when videotape

was invented. Maybe I should have called this talk “A Fleeting Filibuster on the Future

of Film,” but it seemed that a title relating to the past was appropriate, thus “Film–Is

There a Future in Our Past? (The Afterlife of Latent Images).” The idea of the latent

image–exposed film waiting for development–is one of the key differences between film,

and its bond with the past, and video, with its virtual window on the present. Of course

once the latent image is developed, and comes to life on the screen, it only knows the present

tense. Thus, the notion that film’s future as a medium is in its past, is one of the ironies I

want to explore.

“There’s a Future in Our Past” was actually the 1978 motto of a Main Street

renovation project in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, the city where I spent my childhood. That

was the year I started the long shooting process for my experimental documentary, Moose

Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past (1992). By the end of the film, after mocking Moose Jaw’s

commodification of its past in museums and other tourist attractions, I wind up myself in the

Museum of Western Development as a virtual wax figure, frozen in the act of filming a Model

‘T’ Ford with my 16mm Bolex camera (a museum piece itself in the video “revolution”).

(the afterlife of latent images)

An earlier version of this text was originally presented as a keynote speech at “Is Film Dead? A Symposium on the State of Celluloid,” part of the inaugural Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, on March 23, 2007. The symposium, organized by the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, brought together artists, media arts presenters and representatives from artist-run centres from across Canada for two days of discussions on the evolution of film.

_________

incite! issue one 9

Taking obsolescence a step further, in 2000 I started taking pictures exclusively

with disposable, one-time use (non-digital) cameras. With the limitations this presented–

fixed-focus, wide angle lenses that distort at the edges, no control over exposure or shutter

speed, automatic flashes, parallax error, and of course, latent images–I found myself

experiencing a certain freedom: less technical options meant the photographic act became

one of concentration solely on composition, colour, form and light, and the effect of these

on picture content. Eventually I found myself documenting disposability itself–many of

the pictures reveal some kind of deterioration or other transitory state, while others display

veneers, reflections, and dubious likenesses. With the entire photochemical process threat-

ened by digitization, disposable cameras have taken on an extra significance. Disposabilities

reveals how contradictions of material and immaterial, of things lasting and temporary,

become impregnated with each other–how all that is solid melts into air.

The museumization of film reminds me of Mary Anne Doane’s recent book, The

Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive (2002). In this book

she addresses the condition of cinephilia–something she defines as a love of marginal details

in cinema, which she links to its photographic indexicality and predilection for contingency.

Doane says film theorists have become interested in cinephilia “as though the aim of theory

were to delineate more precisely the contours of an object at the moment of its historical

demise.” This is just like Minerva’s owl in Roman mythology. Minerva, the goddess of

wisdom, was accompanied by an owl, which Hegel said spread its wings only with the

falling of the dusk–meaning philosophy comes to understand things just as they pass away.

And as Harold Innis pointed out, Minerva’s owl takes flight when civilisations are in decline.

We could debate extensively the presumption of the cinema’s decline, but this symposium

has asked a more specific question: is film dead? One frequently hears the terms cinema,

film, movies, and video used interchangeably. For example: “I used the latest DVCPRO HD

video camera to shoot my film,” or the more generic “I just finished filming my video.”

Thankfully the symposium has defined filmmaking as emulsion-based practice, or image-

making on celluloid, and while consumers today probably don’t care about these distinctions,

it is nevertheless important for producers to know the difference.

The debate about which medium is better, cheaper, or less “dead,” really started

heating up in the 1970s. In a 1981 article entitled “Is There Film After Video?” B. Ruby Rich

10 incite! issue one

wrote that for more than a decade, despite “proclaiming the end of film-as-we-know-it, and

trumpeting the arrival of a brave new world of video… the world hasn’t crashed down around

our heads… no sinners have plunged into hell, nor dead souls risen from their graves… and

yet the dogma marches onward.” As she pointed out, incumbent forms of expression survived

previous media revolutions. Theatre, newspapers and magazines, radio–film too, with the advent

of television–all had to re-invent themselves. Film may be constantly in a state of dying,

but, to borrow from Kierkegaard, it’s also in a state of becoming.

Almost as long ago as Rich’s article, American Cinematographer Magazine recognized

professional video practices in an issue (March 1982) focusing on the new concept of “electronic

cinematography,” a term designating video techniques modelled after filmmaking (in contrast

to live television). The difference was largely the degree of control which could be exercised

over each aspect of production. Shooting video “film-style,” with a single camera, permitted

greater control over lighting, staging, and composition. Editing sound and picture separately

during post-production also offered improved possibilities for control. Yet important differences

were still noted by the magazine: “film is similar to drawing each frame on a new slate, while

video makes use of the same slate over and over again, nearly erasing each image with a less

than ideal eraser before each subsequent frame.” The most limited aspect of video was seen as

its comparatively narrow luminance range, giving a latitude of only 4 or 5 f-stops. Anton Wilson

said in the same issue, “film negative has a far broader luminance ratio of over 128:1, or more

than 7 stops.” That was 25 years ago, and there has been no reason for Kodak or Fuji to stand

still. Advances in film emulsions have evolved to the point where those seven stops have become

twelve, and films with speeds of 500 ASA–with no noticeable grain–are routinely shot. Here

the new technology is built into the film itself, not the equipment. Producers don’t have to

re-equip every time the rules of the game are changed. The information in a 35mm negative,

or even a well-scanned 16mm negative, already exceeds the resolution required for HDTV.

(And 16mm filmmakers can still use the same reliable, inexpensive Bolex cameras the Swiss

built like watches years ago).1

With videotape a change in format means re-equipping. Now the buzzword is digital,

and even though we’re still talking about video recording on a chip, we’re told the newest

format is “revolutionary.” Despite promises that the latest technology is as “good” as film,

today’s top-of-the-line High-Definition camera will eventually wind up in a garage sale.

incite! issue one 11

Obsolescence guarantees a steady revenue stream for Sony, Panasonic, and all the rest,

supported by consumers who assume all Hollywood has switched. Protested one cinema-

tographer, “I’ve been shooting Hi-Def for over thirty years–it’s called film.”

The notion that the forward direction of time guarantees technological progress (and

social advancement) is one of the great myths of the modern era. It’s true in many instances,

but what is also happening is simply the creation of markets for new gizmos and the production

of obsolescence. Imagine for a moment that the advent of film and video was historically

reversed. Someone shows up on a feature video set with a “new media” film camera. This

new device has variable speeds, twelve stops of exposure latitude, subtle detail in highlights

and shadows, a sharp colour viewfinder, hundreds of lens choices, and a beautiful, high-res

image which can be held up to light and seen with the naked eye. If the name on the side

says “Bolex,” this new camera is not affected by power outages or dead batteries, since it

can also be wound by hand.2

APPARATUS

Editing is one way in which the increased efficiency of digitization is not without loss. In

an essay comparing the apparatus of film and video, entitled “A Matter of Time” (2002),

Babette Mangolte speculates as to why it is difficult for a digital image to communicate

duration, and for young editors to find a sense of tempo. Grain in film “constantly trades

spaces and places from one frame to the next… reinforcing the demonstration of time passing.”

In video, time is fixed as a map and is repeatable, while “silver-based film is structured by

time as entropy.” Mangolte concludes, “The unpredictability of time passing and time past,

the slippage between one and the other, and the pathos of their… difference” is largely lost

in video. In my view “that film look” has much to do with Mangolte’s ontology, which also

assumes the latent image. Thus, since film inherently privileges themes of time and/or

memory–attracting film people thus inspired–the content is equally responsible for the “look”

of film.

Cinematic duration is something the Austrian experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold

exploits when he takes old Hollywood movies and slows down brief passages to excruciating

lengths. Innocuous glances between Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, for example, in

Arnold’s film Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), take on deeply disturbing undertones,


as he exposes “the dreams, hopes, and taboos of the epoch and society that created it.”

Essentially Arnold takes cinephilia to its logical conclusion. Christian Keathley, in his 2006

book Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, observes “Whether it is the gesture

of a hand, the odd rhythm of a horse’s gait, or the sudden change in expression on a face,

these moments are experienced by the cinephile who beholds them as nothing less than an

epiphany…” While he says today’s films, thanks to the influence of television and video,

have reached a point of simplicity in their thorough cultural coding, Catherine Russell would

no doubt see Arnold’s techniques as a redemption of film’s complexity. In Experimental

Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (1999), Russell claims her book is not

are enabling us to see so much more cinema. I would prefer to argue that video is an extension

of cinema, often functioning as an allegory of cinema’s vanishing aura.” She explains how if

ethnography can be understood as discursive, then “its affinities with filmic ontologies of

memorialization, redemption and loss become a rich source of allegorical possibility.”

Like Martin Arnold, these possibilities are being explored by other contemporary

artists using appropriated images from popular culture, transforming the original into cultural

commentary, criticism, and parody. Recently, a coalition of art professionals in Canada wrote

an open letter to the Stephen Harper government expressing their deep concern over the proposed

Canadian Copyright reform, which they fear will compound the problems of appropriation artists

under the law. They say the time has come for the Canadian government to consider replacing

“fair dealing” with a broader defence, such as “fair use” that will offer artists the certainty they

require to create.3 Obviously, as the Coalition points out, contemporary culture (which I take

to include the digital imperative) should not be immune to critical commentary.

RESIDUAL THEORY

Film artists who recycle found footage, and others re-thinking the cinematic apparatus as an

oppositional strategy, are working in a domain that the cultural theorist Raymond Williams

referred to as “residual” (as opposed to “dominant” or “emergent”). The residual has nothing

to do with what is archaic; while the residual may have emerged from or been formed in the

past, it is “still active in the cultural process… not at all as an element of the past, but as an

effective element of the present.” And while we could assume “emergent” must be then

associated with everything digital, Williams warned it is hard to tell whether emergent


practices represent something really new, alternative or oppositional, or are just some aspect

of the dominant culture. In my colleague Charles Acland’s book Residual Media (2007),

Michelle Henning writes on how emergent and residual practices, once they become too threat-

ening–i.e. popular–are quickly incorporated into the dominant culture. The business of nostalgia,

for example, is one way of subsuming the residual and defusing its political potential. Henning

says that, “Today not only do objects (and practices) become obsolescent increasingly quickly,

they remain obsolescent for less time before being seized on as collectibles, renewed as

commodities, revived, replayed, and repeated.”

Such appropriation by dominant culture still gets disguised under the sign of “new

media.” But new media isn’t what it used to be. It no longer simply means digital as opposed

to analog, it just means new in relation to last year’s digital revolution. And video is no longer

new either, as it was when Tom Sherman was writing in the 1970s about how culture could be

“engineered” to undermine film’s supposed hegemony. He saw a “take over” by video as an

advantage and called it the best medium to critique cinema. Then, we must ask, what is the

best medium to critique video? Or is the digital dynamo beyond criticism? In what was once

hailed as a new, environmentally friendly industry, outdated “new media” electronic–and now

digital–devices are quickly becoming a major source of environmental waste. Just in Quebec

alone, 158,000 metric tonnes of this stuff is trashed annually–the equivalent in weight of

20,000 elephants (which are at least biodegradable)–with no province-wide plan to handle it.

ARCHIVES

Ironically, the disposal of analog film is not a problem for those whose job it is to preserve

film and photographic images. Archives ideally make an attempt to preserve films in the

same medium in which they were intended to be seen, and so prints are struck from old

negatives, or in some cases from the only existing print (now the new master positive.) But

in many instances, film originals are digitized over to a video medium, which will break down

and need to be replaced. This prospect of constant image migration is at best inefficient compared

to the superior dye-keeping stability of colour negative film, now able to last well over 100 years.

If motion picture film or photographic originals survive the dustbin after being

digitized, they can in any case still remain inaccessible. “Analog is having a burial and digital

is dancing on its grave,” said Sarah Boxer in the New York Times regarding the Bettmann


Archives’ move from New York City in 2001. This enormous archive of the 20th century,

consisting of 17 million photographs, was purchased by Bill Gates’ company, Corbis, and

buried 220 feet down a limestone mine north of Pittsburgh. The idea was to create a sub-zero

archival stash immune from everything from vandals to nuclear war. Researchers can only

access a catalogue in New York where a small part of the collection, considered worthy by

Corbis, has been digitized. This inspired Arthur Kroker to coin the term “image-matrix” in

his online publication CTheory. He described the buried Bettman Archive as “photography in

a bubble. Memory in cold storage. Images fast-frozen… A psychoanalytics of digital

repression.” Kroker says it is our future as humans to disappear into images, by which he

means not just television and consumer video, but also “those images-matrices that harvest

human flesh: MRI/CT scans, thermography.”

In Paolo Usai’s The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital

Dark Age (2001), a book which Martin Scorsese hailed as “an elegy to the thousands of copies

of films being destroyed everyday all over the world,” Usai writes, “the much touted benefits

of the Digital Revolution have quickly shifted towards a subtle, yet pervasive ideology.

There’s something inherently reactionary in how worldwide consensus has been gathered

around this new myth of scientific progress. What’s worse, denouncing its excesses will make

you feel like the latest anti-technologist on the block.” Usai and Kroker both wrote their

observations in 2001. Years later, nothing much seems to have changed. Heather Hendershot

edited a series of articles for a 2006 special issue of Cinema Journal on the state of 16mm film.

The hype around new media still beckons: “Our classrooms are increasingly filled with digital

projectors,” she says, “in part, because even in a strapped budgetary environment ‘going

digital’ is seen as a worthwhile innovation. It’s easier to write a sexier proposal for a ‘smart

class-room’ than to advocate that the same money should be spent on higher salaries, more

hires, better healthcare benefits, or even more books for the library.”

That said, other contributors to the issue are surprisingly optimistic. Jan-Christopher

Horak reports substantial sales increases of 16mm negative film stock over the last few years.

According to Kodak, this resurgence can be attributed to several factors, including the release

of an inexpensive, lightweight Super 16 camera by Aaton, and new lenses for Super 16 being

manufactured by Arriflex, Canon, and Cooke. It is ironic that digital innovation is actually

extending the life of celluloid. Digital transfer of film to video is now so improved that the


amount of information scanned from a Super 16 negative is equivalent to what was possible

with 35mm just a few years ago (with subsequent budget savings of almost 30% versus shoot-

ing on 35mm). Fotokem Labs on the west coast is developing up to 300,000 feet per week

of Super 16, much of it for television shows like Law and Order. Fotokem is also process-

ing thousands of feet of Super 16 a week for USC’s film school and double that for the Los

Angeles-based New York Film Academy.

Many independent and avant-garde filmmakers continue to shoot 16mm for

aesthetic rather than economic reasons. Improvements in digital video scanning, not to

mention post-production on desk-top computers, have even had a trickle-down effect to

Super 8mm film. While Kodak may have phased out Super 8 Kodachrome (not so 16mm

Kodachrome) they have actually introduced a saturated, fine-grain Super 8 colour reversal

stock, and even 200 and 500 ASA colour negative stocks for professionals on low budgets

who like the look of film.

In this same Cinema Journal, Scott MacDonald, in a piece entitled “16mm: Reports

of Its Death are Greatly Exaggerated,” speculates that, before long, 16mm projection will

even undergo something of a revival. “The fundamental issue here,” he writes, “is not

which projection technology is theoretically‘better’ either in practical or aesthetic terms,

but the compelling nature of the films that have been made on 16mm… and the remarkable

accomplishments of alternative filmmakers, including those working in 8mm.” He notes

that it is in fact because educational institutions and libraries divested themselves of 16mm

for a generation that any surviving prints and negatives will increase in value. According

to MacDonald, “Any institution with the sense to maintain its capacity for good 16mm

projection during the coming years will increasingly be recognized as… ahead of its time,

and all those… in a hurry to believe that each new exhibition technology must replace the

previous will, in retrospect, look foolish.”

RESIDUAL PRACTICES AND POST-CINEMA

While I suggested earlier that Minerva’s Owl may be set to take flight, it is now, in this moment

when film seems most threatened, that things have been getting interesting. Tess Takahashi, in

a 2005 essay on direct, film surface animation, notes “over the past ten years, there has been an

explosion of avant-garde film and media exhibition, increased scholarly work, and the revital-


ization of long-abandoned avant-garde filmmaking practices.” In these films, the visible

presence of artists exploiting the indexicality of the medium, literally with their own physical

imprints–or in some cases, bodily fluids–emerges as a new kind of authorial guarantee, as

opposed to the no-name, remote enhancements of pre-programmed digital filters.

During my career, despite using what is often seen as an expensive, somehow

“undemocratic,” or “elitist” medium, my 16mm films have always been on the fringes of

dominant culture. Why? Maybe they’re too opposed to traditional film techniques. I was

accused in the 1978 Grierson Documentary Film Seminar (along with others, like James

Blue), of deliberately ignoring 80 years of film tradition with my film Home for Christmas

(1978). That is why I bristle when I’m tarred with the same brush as cigar-chewing movie

moguls simply because I use the same medium. In my case the medium affects content signifi-

cantly, and while it may all wind up on a screen of some kind, the tools with which both film

and video artists choose to work are no less important than the choice other artists make

among media. Nobody would think of telling a painter that since it all winds up on a canvas

it doesn’t matter whether he or she uses oils, acrylics, pastels, or watercolours. (Or should all

painters be using acrylics, seeing as how they’re newer than oils, or dry faster?)

Of increasing concern to film artists is the degree to which we are dependent on large

corporations to manufacture the film stock, sophisticated laboratories to process it, and how

they in turn are affected by the economics of digital hegemony. Partly for this reason a degree

of healthy self-preservation has emerged in alternative film practice, in which artists are hand

processing their own film stock–and even, in the case of my colleague Roy Cross–making

their own film emulsions. As well, there is Phil Hoffman’s famous “Film Farm” in southwestern

Ontario, which made the cover of POV magazine in 2006, to which even industry professionals

return, to the earth as it were, getting their hands dirty (or more precisely, wet) learning how

to hand process and creatively manipulate their own film.

These kinds of alternative and oppositional film practices are undertaken not just for

economic reasons, but often for the sheer pleasure of contact derived from hand-crafted art.

Anyone who consults the late Helen Hill’s Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cook-

booklet (2001), or ever had the good fortune to know her (I didn’t), realizes that all filmmaking

doesn’t have to give in to the dominant culture, digital or otherwise. If, as Ruby Rich said

in 1981, film will need to reinvent itself to survive, the process has already begun. There are


new possibilities for alternative film production and dissemination many of us could never

have dreamed of years ago.4 Look for example at the March/April 2007 issue of Filmprint,

the magazine of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)–the same people

who sponsored the highly successful film event Film is Dead – Long Live Film! 25 Manifestos

for the Rebirth of Film as an Art Form. Attached to the centrefold of each Filmprint issue

is a return envelope containing 24 frames of 16mm clear leader and 24 frames of black, with

tips on how to scratch and colour the footage by hand. Readers are invited to mail back their

finished, cameraless film for splicing in with the others, helping LIFT make the “World’s

First Direct Mail Movie.”

After all this, it makes me sad when I hear definitive statements like, “Film is finally

dying for real… cinematographers are shooting in digital format rather than the more expensive

16mm or 35mm.” Video is finding its place as a professional industry medium, but it doesn’t

mean that since some cinematographers use HD for some productions they’re all doing it!

Or that since still photography has “gone digital,” so has cinematography. I’d like to say to

the general public, when you’re watching all those exciting movies on the big screen and

munching popcorn, what do you think they were shot on? As one bumper sticker seen in

California reads, “You can have my film camera when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

Instead of bumper stickers and death certificates, instead of cringing around all those film

cans and scary steel Bolexes, we should encourage the kind of creative environment where

all photographic media are allowed to coexist simply as a set of artistic tools, each with their

own merits, from which we as artists and analog human beings are free to choose.


Notes

1. In the Communication Studies Department at Concordia University, we are retrofitting our Bolexes to handle Super 16mm, which approximates the 16:9 aspect ratio of HD video. It involves widening the camera’s aperture to expose the side of the 16mm negative formerly reserved for sound, and re-centering the lens mount–all at nominal expense. Students can still use the latest, regular 16mm stocks, but a signifi-cantly larger negative with a wider aspect ratio results.

2. Our students actually get the best of both worlds–analog and digital. The superior Super 16 negative, once developed by the lab, is then scanned directly to DVCAM or Digi-Beta, digitally edited using Final Cut Pro HD, and “printed” to video. The students show their work and send it to festivals on DVD. But before that, they have an exercise where they select from reels of 16mm “found” footage we have lying around the Department, and edit it into a collage film with sound on a 16mm Steenbeck. It’s a creative way to experience traditional film editing, which served as the model for the non-linear, digital editing programs we know today.

3. In Canada the Copyright Act provides that any “fair dealing” with a work for purposes of private study or research, or for criticism, review or news reporting is not infringement. But the line between fair dealing and infringement is a thin one. There are no guidelines that define the number of words or passages that can be used without permission from the author, and no broader concept of “fair use,” such as in the United States. In the U.S. fair use, codified in section 107 of the copyright law, includes four factors to be con-sidered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair: (1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copy-righted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copy-righted work. Of interest to collage filmmakers and other appropriation artists might be the 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law, which cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use, including “use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied.” For more information see http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/cipo/cp/copy_gd_protect-e.html#6. See also http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.htm

4. Josh Bonnetta, an MFA student whose thesis I’m supervising, is producing a series of direct animation films using a variety of radical exposure and hand-developing techniques. In one film he stretched out raw film stock on his front lawn, placing tiny shards of coloured glass on top and exposing it to the light of the moon. The results were exquisite.


film: another death, another lifegerda cammaer

>> Or, in the words of Jean-Luc Godard: “Le cinema est mort, vive le cinema.” (Le Mepris, 1963)

The main topics I seek to address in this paper are the decay of cinema, of which the death

of film is just one part, the loss of the filmic due to an imposed takeover by digital processes,

and the relationship between these two trends. I will attempt to put these topics in perspective

(historically and artistically) to illustrate that the current doom thinking represents a limited

outlook on the future of cinema, although I agree that we should be concerned about the future

of film. I will start by making distinctions between “film,” “cinema,” and “movies,” to clarify

the terms of debate.

Film for me refers to the medium itself: as the filmstrip carrying a layer of light

sensitive emulsion in which a latent image is formed upon exposure to light. Film is also the

most general and neutral term when referring to any kind of motion picture, the entire medium,

or all motion pictures collectively. Film in this sense differs from cinema, which comes from

the Greek word “kinema” meaning motion, which also indicates motion pictures in general, as

an art form specifically. I tend to restrict the use of “cinema” to the aesthetics and internal

structure of the art of film (or film as an art form). The filmic refers to those specific aspects

of the cinema that concern its technical qualities (usually discussed in relation to reality)–

the pictures–while movies refers to film’s function as an economic commodity: a consumable,

popular, entertainment product. The latter is not my object of study, but it is impossible to

avoid referring to the movies in any debate about the death of film.


_____

This essay is a revised and abridged version of a keynote speech presented at “Is Film Dead? A Symposium on the State of Celluloid,” part of the inaugural Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, on March 23, 2007. During the keynote speech, excerpts from Film Ist (Gustav Deutsch, 1998) and Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002) were projected in the background.

THE DECAY OF CINEMA

As an introduction to some of the current thinking about what the digital revolution means

for the future of cinema, I turn to Godfrey Cheshire’s 1999 article in the New York Press titled,

“The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.”1 Cheshire makes a similar distinction between

film, movies, and cinema. Film for Cheshire refers to the “traditional” technology of the motion

pictures: cameras, projectors, celluloid, lights and other gear needed to make a film. His prognosis

of its future: sudden death. Movies refers to motion pictures as entertainment, as in “everybody

loves the movies.” His prognosis: forced mutation. Cinema refers to film understood and

practiced as an art. His prognosis: rapid decay.

Cheshire’s three scenarios are at the core of most debates about how the digital

revolution will affect the movies, change cinema, and kill film. While themes and optimism

vary,2 there seems to be consensus that the biggest and quickest change will be the replacement

of film in movie theaters. The movie industry is eager to force this technology upon its

consumers because it needs to recoup its financial investment in this new technology.3

But isn’t this yet another overthrow of film by television?4 For years now, the industry

has adjusted all films to the TV screen through reframing, dubbing, and re-editing. Thus,

while many viewers already have a distorted view of films the industry now brings a television

aesthetic into the film theatre. I can think of only one reason left to see a film in a digitized

film theater that has become just a bigger version of your home movie system: sound. With the

newest surround system developed by THX (10.2 channel audio) on its way into theatres,

watching a film in total darkness with hyper-realistic sound might still be an experience worth

paying for. But it is not unthinkable that the new price of admission will equal or surpass the

declining price of DVDs. Hence the same market logic that pushes for digitization everywhere,

foreshadows the death of digital theatres: people will still prefer to watch cheaper DVDs in the

comfort of their homes on their ever-improving home movie systems.

Let’s turn to more systematic considerations of the death of film and ponderings on

the decay of cinema. At the conclusion of a book titled The End of Cinema as We Know It:

American Film in the Nineties (2002), the film scholar and experimental filmmaker Wheeler

Winston Dixon5 summarizes 24 reasons why “it is all over.”6 I would like to list some of his

key arguments, complementing or countering them from a non-mainstream point-of-view.


First, he states, "Theatrical distribution is no longer a certainty." I have

already made my argument about why analogue theatrical distribution is at risk, but it is

worth noting that this also means the loss of a particular and valuable experience. However,

some, such as Peter Greenaway, argue that human beings are not made to sit still in the dark

for two hours, only looking forward and not around. He states that the sooner a cinema

with these characteristics dies, the better: “Cinema as our fathers and forefathers knew it

was a passive, elitist medium, made expensively for the patronized many by the condescend-

ing few, with a distribution system that has made its own product virtually unviewable.”7

Greenaway proposes to re-invent cinema by, among other strategies, the production of

multimedia projects, which is indeed one of the possibilities for the survival of film.

"Movies cost too much to make, and there is too much merchandise." Video

technology has become increasingly affordable, opening up the “market” to many more voices.

Virtually anyone can make “films” these days (for better and for worse). But this has reinforced

the decline in materials and services available to the 16mm filmmaker. Because digital video

is promoted as the tool for the independent filmmaker, those willing to work in film have seen

their tools become increasingly scarce and expensive.

"Foreign films no longer get international theatrical distribution." Indeed,

the art-house circuit has shrunk to a few theatres in a few major metropolitan centers, and

almost on par with their disdain for silent and black-and-white films, present-day audiences

show a growing aversion to subtitled films. While globalization is heavily promoted on the one

hand, the real picture shows mostly protectionist and solipsistic reflexes.

"The majors have an international lock on distribution and production, which

is only intensifying as new markets open up. As the conglomerate parents of the

major studios extend their reach through the portals of cyberspace, they seek to

find a wider audience for films devoid of risk, talent, or originality, rather than

giving voice to the new."� A good example: David Lynch toured his recent film, Inland

Empire (2007) to various art-house cinemas himself. Despite critical acclaim at the

Venice Film Festival and regular distribution in Europe, he could not find a U.S. distributor.

Ironically this film was shot entirely on digital video and thus could be a perfect vehicle

to promote the latest technology. Inland Empire was also made without a pre-written script.

Lynch created the dialogue and developed the storyline day-to-day during the shoot. So this is


also a film that could serve to generate interest in the new possibilities digital video opens up

for feature-length narrative filmmaking. The decision not to distribute his film might make

financial sense, but it does not make artistic sense. Similar principles are at work in the pro-

duction and distribution of technology as well. The Internet and its ever better and faster

streaming quality has made phenomena such as YouTube possible, which serve to correct

the monopoly of conglomerates and have become an important outlet for alternative voices.

But often cultural and political constraints are rapidly implemented to limit the gains in

freedom of expression.8

"We (the audience) no longer believe in images, since computer-generated

images make any effect possible. [...] The veracity of the moving image has been

hopelessly compromised; the demarcation line between the real and the engineered

(both aurally and visually) has been obliterated. All is construction and fabulation.

All is predetermined; nothing natural remains."� The experimental filmmaker Nathaniel

Dorsky expresses a similar plaint. In a discussion with Stan Brakhage, Dorsky states:

>> When I look at this thing [video] on a monitor, and it’s wonderful as information, but it’s not touching what I want it to touch. When I’m with my Bolex […] I feel I am now working with a precious thing. Part of the art of filmmaking is the fear of intruding upon the blank state [this is also what prompted Brakhage to work directly on clear film stock]. But on video, there really is not much of an intrusion, because you can just tape and erase. With a roll of film, it’s so expensive that when you’re going to push the button, it’s an existential decision.9

Its direct relationship to reality and its artistry is an often-heard argument in favor of shooting

on film, combined with the excitement and suspense of having to wait to see the result. On

the other hand, especially for independent narrative and documentary projects digital pro-

duction and distribution save money and time, thus making it easier and cheaper to produce

films. Still there is no guaranteed access to distribution.

"All films are now 'composed' for TV screens rather than cinema

screens, leading to a barrage of flat, uninvolving visuals." I would add that there

seems to be little thought put into the choice of aspect ratio anymore. Even in some artistic

work there is a weird, nonsensical mixing of ratios with little or no consideration for how

the frame impacts our perception of images. Greenaway, in his plea for a re-invention of

the cinema, cites the frame as one of four tyrannies that cinematic language must liberate


itself from. Digital technology definitely makes it easier to fashion the frame to fit the content.

According to him, “it is no longer a passive jail of four right angles.”10 Other constraints

that cinema needs to liberate itself from, according to Greenaway, include the tyrannies

of text, actors, and narrative. I agree that these issues have prevented cinema’s development

as an art, locking it in more repeated conventions, often derived from other arts such as

literature and theatre.

"The demise of film itself in favor of digital video production and

distribution is imminent."�With an industry frantically trying to curtail production costs,

the aesthetic qualities of film, achieved through lighting, depth of field, image saturation

etc, are abandoned in favor of a “clearer,” more “stripped down” image. Tom Sherman

considers this transition a positive development. He declares video the “most direct, literal,

explicit medium we have for exploring and manipulating reality.”11 Further, “Video has

affected all sectors of society (sports, surveillance and security, dating, shopping, cooking,

sexuality) and yes, it has affected film. Unfortunately, video […] has absorbed film and, in

its saturation of all things cinematic, it appears as something it isn’t. Video is not film.”12

That distinction is quickly disappearing though, in part because video has not just affected

film, it is now completely taking over. According to Dixon, "Film will reside only in the

domain of archives, museums, and specialized revival houses." The latter is maybe

not such a bad evolution; within museums and specialized theatres, film may again become

cinema, reclaiming its status as art. Indeed, experimental film has, for the longest time, been

denied this place (not so with video art).

"The canon is increasingly rigid, and non-canonical films are disappearing."

One reason for this is the constant construction and repetition of “greatest film” lists, which

are created to sell DVDs. These “classics of cinema” represent only a tiny fraction of film

history and impoverish its heritage to the point that it is hardly worth preserving anymore.

Countless shorts, features, narrative and non-narrative films (many made by women) have

been excluded from the canon. DVD distribution is slightly correcting this: one can buy many

more films on DVD than was ever possible on VHS, including countless obscure titles.

Teaching film history has become easier now that you can order almost any film to illustrate

a lecture.13 Also, many art houses and small distributors can afford to release and distribute

the films in their collections in digital format themselves.14 On the other hand, many “boutique”

DVD distributors are either going out of business as quickly as they arrive, or are obliged to


limit their offerings, because many people still only shop from “best of something” lists, and

these small distributors do not have the budgets to promote their products competitively

against bigger labels.

"Classical film production methodology has collapsed."�Lots of traditional

technical production methods have become obsolete: workprints, magnetic film sound transfers,

Steenbeck editing machines, human controlled Chapman cranes, film stock itself: all of this has

disappeared or is disappearing. This is mostly the industry’s loss. Many artists, against the

odds, continue to work with traditional film products and processes, and with increasing

attention. For instance, observe the revival of Super 8 and 16mm performances that highlight

both the beauty and fragility of film,15 as well as the revival of hand-processed and camera-

less films. Others have undertaken to rework cinema history by giving archival images a

new life in collage films, a genre that–not surprisingly–has gained in popularity as the nostalgia

for an (almost) dead medium blossoms, with so many leftovers of its glory days available

to be recycled.16

Dixon also observes that "optical effects, such as fades and dissolves, which

once required extensive laboratory work, are accomplished with the flick of a switch.

While the star-system remains as pernicious as ever, the style and polish of the

films themselves is created entirely in a synthetic manner in post-production." To

extend Dixon’s lament about mainstream media and its content, as a scholar interested in

the medium of film, and its so-called immanent death, I am annoyed by the excessive use

of filmic effects in television shows and commercials. Many of these, while obviously

not shot on film, contain clear references to celluloid characteristics such as flares, dust,

scratches, and even frame burns (a now-common digital effect). Some commercials use

academy leader as a count down, indicating something to take off from and leave behind,

while others use old Super 8 images to evoke a nostalgic travelogue feel. I suggest we let

film be film, and video be video. This kind of fake filmic imagery only enhances the idea

among general audiences that film is dead, or at least a medium of the past, only good for

memories and trickery.

"The Internet and the Web have become important alternative visual and

information mediums. The media mix has now so many potential avenues for exploration

that one is hard pressed to commit to any image stream for more than a few

minutes." Indeed the most abrasive influence of the Web and cable TV is the convoluted


layering of textual, visual, and aural information (i.e. the weather, the stock ticker, live images,

graphics, advertising, each screaming for our attention, forcing us, in the case of the Web,

to click on ever more new windows, even if just to close them). The impact of this on both

our perception and attention span seems obvious. To what extent this pushes film to the scrap

heap is another matter. Recall that many earlier avant-garde films were already commenting

on the overflow of information in mainstream culture by layering images with multiple

exposures and other optical tricks. Complex multilayered images are not per se a bad thing.

But, if this is the only imagery people are offered, and if the result is decreased patience for

a long, quiet, empty shot (be it zen-like or full of tension), then this means a tremendous

loss for our visual culture.

"And yet, despite all this, the cinema will live forever."� After all his pessimism,

Dixon finally offers us some hope:

>> What I’m really taking about here is a technology shift, albeit a profound one, one that will

end “movies as we know them,” but not the cinema itself. It may be that 35 mm film will be

consigned to the scrap heap of memory. All-digital production and exhibition will offer us an

entirely different sort of theatrical viewing experience. Audiences keep getting younger and

more impatient, and yet classics of the past will continue to haunt us, informing our collective

consciousness of mid-to-late twentieth century culture. It is entirely appropriate that we should

witness this seismic adjustment in the first few years of a new century; seen from this perspect-

ive, one might just as easily argue that far from dying, the movies are reinventing themselves

for the patrons of a new era. […] So, because Film as we know it has always been dying and is

always being reborn, what we are witnessing now is nothing more than the dawn of a new

grammar, a new technological delivery and production system, with a new series of plots,

tropes, iconic conventions, and stars. What happens next is a matter for future historians

to document, but for the moment, we must be content to speculate, and realize that no matter

how the cinematic medium transforms itself in the coming decades, it will always continue

to build on, and carry forward, the past.

Building on Dixon’s final statement it is time to consider how the death of film forces us to think

about possibilities for the cinematic medium “to build on, and carry forward, the past.”

TOWARDS ANOTHER REBIRTH OF FILM

From the very beginning, film was considered an invention without a future. Louis Lumière,

one of its inventors, already stated this. Since then cinema has died many deaths and survived


them all. Stephan Jovanovich neatly sums up the end-of-cinema discourses, which collectively

put forth “a multi-dimensional causal picture to which the end of cinema might be both anticipated

and lamented,” at the same time continuing a persistent tendency to postulate the end of cinema

that has been present since its birth.17 Indeed, since Tom Gunning launched the idea of a

“cinema of attractions,”18 much scholarship on the invention of cinema emphasizes the uncertain

technological and cultural status of early cinema, whose very existence competed with many

other techniques and forms of popular entertainment and leisure.19 Jovanovich recounts the

ongoing succession of film-historical traumas that followed: the arrival of sound (probably

the only event that came close to marking a real death in cinema, that of the silent film), the

introduction of television, the advent of video, VHS, the remote control, and now digital

technology.20

According to many, film is finally dying a real death. Many cinematographers now

shoot digital rather than the more expensive 16mm or 35mm formats.21 In photography the

switch to digital is even more dramatic. Most professional photographers now shoot digital

and sales of digital cameras have been outstripping film cameras since 2003. But even before

its passing, film is being mourned by many.22 There is no doubt that digital cinema lacks the

formal qualities and romance of celluloid, and professionals–whether projectionists, D.O.P.’s,

filmmakers, or teachers–all agree on this.23 However, as Jovanovich notes, hybrid cinematic

works and dramatic improvements in digital technology throughout the last decade (such as

increased resolution, anamorphic widescreen effects, and high quality video-to-film transfers)

seem to have eliminated the aesthetic stigma of video as a inferior production tool in cinema.

The accelerating pace of digital film convergence is rendering all of the old distinctions

arbitrary, to the disadvantage (and in that sense, inevitable demise) of the celluloid medium.

So, besides reinventing cinema as an art form, we also have to redefine it as a medium, and

resituate it. This current death of film (celluloid) is a good place to start from, and artists

working with film are the proper experts to contribute to this reinvention, redefinition, and

rebirth of film.

I see experimental and expanded cinema as an important laboratory for film’s

survival, not just as a moving image format in both a technical and aesthetic sense, but also

as a memory of resistance in a cultural sense. Experimental cinema is a site where the passion

for film can survive and surpass the doom thinking about the death of film. In a broader

historical context this debate should be seen as a continuation of a tradition in avant-garde


film to call into question, largely through radical form (sometimes combined with radical

content), the very nature and perception of film in our society, such as the current discourses

about the death of film. To achieve this, experimental filmmakers often treat film as an object,

rather than an instrument, in order to express individual consciousness and conscience. Such

films, particularly found footage films, act as a meta-commentary on moving images and their

function in the past, present, and future. Process-based films (most experimental cinema),

which provoke critical thought and active reflection more than mere pleasure and forgetful-

ness, open up possibilities for cinema to expand rather than to become extinct. The best

experiments in film, ones that have carried the medium forward, usually happened at times of

technological flux: many of film’s past deaths were actually rebirths.24

It is no coincidence then that we are now witnessing a revival of experimental

filmmaking. Hand-processed and hand-crafted projects bring the medium’s formal qualities

to the forefront. Found footage films are receiving renewed consideration from film artists

and scholars alike. The interest in found footage has, without any doubt, also been sparked

by the increased availability of discarded material, especially 16mm and Super 8 footage, as

they become more and more obsolete as screening formats (soon to be followed by 35mm?).

Found footage films are also cheap to make, and thus provide a way to continue working in

film even as supply and lab costs become prohibitively expensive. Found footage films also

allow for an interesting synthesis of film history. The latter is a main point of intersection

between scholars and makers. Collectively, found footage films represent a set of historic

documents about the medium, which re-exposes images that otherwise might be lost and

remain unknown. They also expose and explore the very same physical qualities of analogue

film that pushed the industry to seek digital “perfection” in the first place, and they celebrate

all the perceptual pleasures that only analogue film can offer (i.e. Film Ist). Moreover, several

filmmakers consciously work with the decay of images as a formal strategy, amplifying our

nostalgia for the heydays of celluloid. Ironically, to see the decay of film on film is actually

stunning (i.e. Decasia).

This brings me to the only true death of film so far: its constant decay due to its

proper physical characteristics. Only about 20% of the films of the silent period have survived

and nearly half of all films made before 1950 have been irretrievably lost to the twin exigencies

of neglect and nitrate decomposition. Add to this the phenomenon of cellulose acetate degrad-

ation and the rapid fading of color prints and it is easy to conclude that the physical survival


of our entire motion picture heritage is at serious risk. We must change how we see and

handle our celluloid past, especially in defense against a ferocious film industry that favors

cheap, digital technology in its attempt to save money, and which also destroys countless

prints to prevent unwanted second-run screenings and copyright infringements. Dominique

Païni, who has written extensively on experimental and avant-garde cinema, relates the

disintegration of film texts (the fragmentation of narrative)–a new grammar of sorts–to film

history, preservation, production, and the changes in these fields. He notes that, while formerly

the notion of a “preserved” film was virtually synonymous with a film restored and re-shown

in its entirety, the preservation and presentation of incomplete films–especially surviving

fragments of films from the 1910s–has become more commonplace over the past decades.

Accordingly, this trend “suggests a tendency to recast the history of film not as a successive

series of complete works, but as a vast and heterogeneous visual anthropology of film fragments,

an archeology of ruins.”25 Therefore the practices of compilation film and film citation are

more significant than ever. They provide a way of thinking about the historical power of

images, film’s current status as a crumbling object, and its uncertain future.

CONCLUSION

Where do we stand then with this current death of film? Isn’t the whole debate enhanced by

another intrinsic aspect of the medium: its unrelenting hunger for drama, for images of horror,

disaster, and trauma, even with regards to its own faith? Many filmmakers have scripted

cinema’s death from within.26 So, if this is indeed the true, immanent death of film, it is in

part a suicide. However, I have faith in celluloid’s future. It has been, and will be for decades

to come, the most stable and secure moving image support, and it is therefore the medium

of choice in film conservation. Digital work, when lost, is gone; when a film breaks, fades,

or crumbles, one can still splice it, reprint the image, and restore it, if necessary, frame-by-

frame. This is the beauty and the strength of the medium, and nobody knows this better than

experimental filmmakers, whose artistic language is grounded in the materiality of film.

Answering Godard’s statement that “Cinema is death 24 frames a second,”27 I say film is also

life 24 frames a second. I truly hope artists and independent filmmakers will carry cinema’s past

into the future by continuing to work on and with film, breathing new life into the medium,

be it through small hand-crafted films, collages, or as multimedia installations. Film is and

can be many things. Whether one believes that medium specificity is passé, or seeks to


reinvigorate film through creative archival projects, for those who want to see it and know

where to look, film is alive.

Notes

1. Godfrey Cheshire, “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema,” New York Press (August 26, 1999), http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=243

2. Shortly after this symposium, D.N. Rodowick published The Virtual Life of Film (2007) in which he analyses the recent changes in the medium, what it means in cultural terms, and the consequences for film scholars in particular. I quote: “The next ten years may witness the almost complete disappear-ance of celluloid film stock as a recording, distribution, and exhibition medium. For the avid cinephile, it is tempting to think about the history of this substitution as a terrifying remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the course of a single decade, the long privilege of the analog image and the technology of analog image production have been almost completely replaced by digital simulations and digital processes” (8).

3. Cheshire also raises the problem that the general public is never consulted about their wishes or prospects when introducing new technology. See Cheshire, “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.”

4. Peter Greenaway makes a similar argument, stating: “Cinema died on the 31st of September, 1983, when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living rooms of the world.” See Greenaway, “Cinema Militants Lecture: Towards a Re-Invention of Cinema” (2003), http://petergreenaway.org.uk/essay3.htm

5. Wheeler Winston Dixon is a Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln) and Editor in Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. During the 1960s he worked as an experimental filmmaker in New York, then moved to Los Angeles and London in the late 60s and early 70s to work in the film industry. Dixon is the author or editor of numerous books, including, most recently, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, A Short History of Film (2007), Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader (2002), and The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image (2000).

6. 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, 2001), pp. 356-66.

7. Peter Greenaway, “Cinema Militants Lecture.”

8. For example, in 2007 a Turkish court ordered a ban of YouTube. According to Nico Hines, “Greek videos reportedly accused the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of homosexuality; a Turkish user responded by calling Greece the birthplace of homosexuality. It is illegal to criticise either Ataturk or Turkishness in Turkey and the prosecutor’s office in Istanbul acted despite YouTube’s agreement to take down the offending videos.” See Hines, “YouTube banned in Turkey after video insults,” Times Online (March 7, 2007). Turk Telecom complied with the court order and shut down access to YouTube throughout Turkey. Since then there have been many other similar cases.


9. This interview between Ed Halter and Brakhage and Dorsky covers the new generation of avant-garde filmmaking, DV versus Film, the relationship of the experimental scene to Indiewood and Hollywood, etc. See Halter, “True Independents; Brakhage and Dorsky Hash Out the Realities of Poetic Cinema,” Indiewire, http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Brakhage_Dorsky_010430.html

10. Peter Greenaway, “Cinema Militants Lecture.”

11. Tom Sherman, “Video 2005: Three Texts on Video,” Canadian Art (Spring 2005): 4. Other versions of Sherman’s arguments in favor of video can be found in his article, “Vernacular Video: How Video’s Belated Coming of Age will Change Everything,” UKULA, http://www.ukula.com/TorontoArticle.aspx?SectionID=3&ObjectID=1820&CityID=3

12. Tom Sherman op.cit.

13. For a different example of DVD publishing, see the DVD-format film magazine, Wholphin, http://www.wholphindvd.com/index.php

14. See, for example, the compilations of experimental films that the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre has produced and promoted: http://cfmdc.org/content.php?page=DVD

15. For instance, check out UK artist Guy Sherwin’s work, http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/guy_sherwin/index.html, or California’s Wet Gate Collective, http://www.wetgate.net/

16. Two good examples are the films I use to illustrates this lecture: Deutsch’s Film Ist and Morrison’s Decasia. For more on Film Ist see Tom Gunning, “Film ist: A Primer for a Visual World,” sixpackfilm, http://www.sixpackfilm.com/archive/texte/01_filmvideo/filmist_gunningE.html. In my eyes, Decasia is a less successful model. For more on this and other films that use the decay of celluloid as basic material, see Claudy op den Kemp, “Plus belle que la beauté est la ruine de la beauté,” Offscreen (November 2004), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/decasia.html

17. Stefan Jovanovich provides an extensive overview of the many arguments and debates about the so-called death of film, mentioning some of the authors cited earlier, including Cheshire. See Jovanovich, “The Ending(s) of Cinema: Notes on the Recurrent Demise of the Seventh Art (Part 1 & 2),” Offscreen (April 2003), http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/death_cinema.html

18. Tom Gunning’s concept of the “cinema of attractions” relates the development of cinema to forces other than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, and an emerging modern visual culture. See Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Film, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1989).

19. As Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz point out, “Cinema constituted only one element in an array of new modes of technology, representation, spectacle, distraction, consumerism, ephemerality, mobility, and entertainment–and at many points neither the most compelling nor the most promising one.” See Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 1.

20. For an complete overview of how the recurrent debates on the death of film interfere with inherent qualities of works that portray death in film, see Jovanovich, “The Ending(s) of Cinema.” Cf. Laura Mulvey’s writings on death and stillness in cinema (footnote 27), particularly her ideas about how digital technology


(through the possibility of freezing the image and making stills from it) exposes even more how film is in fact a medium of death.

21. Rick Hancox addresses this further in his article, “Film – Is There a Future in Our Past?” For an overview of the industry perspective, see the “The Death of Film? Digital Cameras Claim the Future,” http://www.financialexpress.com/old/fe_full_story.php?content_id=116702. See also, “The Death of Film,” LifeWire (September 22, 2005), http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/09/21/1126982069009.html

22. For an example of the digital impact on photography, see Robert Burley’s work on the demolition of photography factories and the disappearance of darkrooms: http://www.robertburley.com/

23. Many film-production professors insist on teaching 16mm to their students because it requires more rigorous practice. The cameras might be 40 years old but they still produce beautiful images with a clarity, depth and detail not possible in video. Shooting on film inspires students to learn more about aesthetics, lighting and framing. Even if the students choose to work in digital for the rest of their lives, they will always have those essential skills and understanding.

24. One of the most devastating changes for film as a medium, and consequential “deaths” of film, was the coming of sound. More than the introduction of TV or digital technology, the invention of sound actually meant a step backwards in the aesthetic development of cinema as art. As such this event can indeed be considered as a death of film or a decay of cinema. But, once sound technology improved, cinema soon reshaped itself as a more complete and rich form of expression than it ever had been (although there are still strong arguments for silent cinema, even today).

25. Dominique Païni cited in Stefan Jovanovich, “The Ending(s) of Cinema.”

26. Michael Witt has written an entire article about this. The author rightfully mentions how Godard–especially in his later work–weaves various figures of cinema’s death in his films, most notably in Éloge de l’amour (2001) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1997-1998). This is addition to his repeated pronouncements of cinema’s death in his writings and in interviews. See Witt, “The Deaths of Cinema According to Godard,” Screen 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1999).

27. Godard cited by Laura Mulvey in “Death 24 Times a Second: The Tension between Movement and Stillness in the Cinema,” http://www.bbooks.de/jve/eyck-mulvey.html


after: a beginner's guide to alchemycarl brown

I work extensively with the optical printer, using it as a vehicle for compression and

expansion of images. By taking a “real” image and looping it, I compress the image by the

use of the spring-wound motor of the Bolex camera. I disengage the automatic motor and

re-photograph the image, with both the camera and the projector running simultaneously.

I make films this way because it involves an interesting paradox.

Beginning with a “realistic” image, either originally made by me, or pulled from

compilation footage, I take either the form of the original image, the movement, or the emotional

quality as the impetus for selection. I take apart (deconstruct) the realism inherent in the

image. This leaves me with an abstraction of form and movement, and I leave the emotional

quality of the image intact. I then create a pulsing loop, which seems appropriate for the image

in question, and as it fits into the scheme of the whole film. A shot may undergo as many as

seven or eight transformations before it is ready to be used. There is beauty in this elongated

process. Essentially, every stage becomes a new shot within itself, and can therefore be

incorporated into a film structure: one can cut from reversal to negative and through this

create the continuity needed for the film to be coherent.

_____

This article was first written in 1982 and sent to Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, David Rimmer, Al Razutis, and Norman McLaren. It has since been published in several catalogues including Image Forum (Tokyo, 1991); La part du visuel: films expérimentaux canadiens récents (Avignon, France: Archives du Film Experimental d'Avignon, 1991); Poétique de la couleur, Une histoire du cinéma expérimental, Anthologie (Paris: Louvre Institut de l’Image, 1995); European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück, 2000); Filmprint (Toronto: The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, 2006).


Consider: because the film is so abstract in this form, one must insert something

so the audience can follow the film. This can work on the level of the (sub)conscious: the

audience perceives the subtleties of film based upon your structure. This takes film into

audience members’ minds. Logically, I can make the length of the shot as long as required

so the rhythm of the shot is embedded in the audiences’ memory. This technique has limit-

less potential; I just begun to tap into it.

As I experimented with this looping process (cycle imaging) more fully, it led me

to other fields of motion picture film: the Sabattier Effect (a form of solarization) and reticulation.

Jeffrey Paull, my instructor at Sheridan College, introduced me to these processes through

Jim Stone’s Darkroom Dynamics, a book designed to take you beyond shooting images

into a world of many possibilities. I applied the book to 16mm motion picture film; it was

designed for 35mm photographers. Looking back on my filmic infancy, I realize I gained a

closer understanding of film as art, physical and mental, from many hours in the darkroom,

developing thousands of feet in my clear jug. I saw it happen right there bathed in red light,

as the film spoke to me clearly. I think this is why I continued my hand-developing studies.

I began to enter a world that to date has merely been touched upon.

Why did I choose these processes? How do they fit into my filmmaking? It became apparent

that the pulsing halo of the Sabattier Effect (a result of exposing the film for short periods of

time while it was in the developer) could be worked into the looping process. I could create

a depth of field beyond the original footage. This depth of field was visible after the original

motion had been slowed down. The halo or glow became something that would gradually

work its way across the image’s highlights. By creating my own depth of field, the abstract

shot became more and more my vision. I converted what I saw into what I felt. This was a

very important event. I had found a foundation to work, and express myself, from.

From this point, I began to chip away at the iceberg with a more experienced and

knowledgeable eye and approach. I began to reticulate the surface of the film, in hopes that

I could create an added dimension to the image. At first, I followed the instructions in the book,

but found no success. I was given all kinds of methods from other articles that were involved

in this endeavor. One person suggested putting the film in the freezer to crack the emulsion.


As it so happened, I stumbled on the right combination after reading various documents on

the subject, one being The Dignan Papers on Alkalinity. The first thing was to use a fixer for

black and white film, which came with a separate hardener. During the mixing of the chemicals,

there is a 32-ounce solution A, which is fixer concentrate to be mixed, and solution B, which is

usually four ounces of hardener concentrate. You simply exclude the solution B. This is stage

one. Without the hardener, the surface of the film becomes more pliable to work with. The

second thing necessary is taken directly from the Stone book, that being, the use of a high

developing temperature. For the contrast I wanted, I found that D-19 developer gave me

the best results. The developing time of D-19 is approximately five minutes in 64 ounces of

developer at 24˚C. Stone’s book recommends 60-65˚C, but I found that all the black and white

stocks I was using would usually peel at that temperature, leaving many emulsion flecks and

pieces. So, I lowered the temperature until I reached what I found to be a workable temperature.

(The temperature is even lower for colour film.)

Finally, I add sodium carbonate to boiling water and submerge the film into the

solution for 20 minutes to a week, depending on how radically reticulated I want the image.

In order for the reticulation to be evenly distributed across the film’s surface, you must attach

the film to whatever surface you intend to pour the solution into. This is a drawback. I use a

bathtub; the lengths of my film are no longer than about four feet. I could loop my original image

on the printer, shoot off about 50 feet, and then finally process it. Somewhere along the way,

I get an original new strand together for the next stage: the extension of the length of the shot.

Sometimes I lose footage, but I view this as a blessing. Through the year, I have lost at least

two thousand feet of film: original and re-printed shots. Losing the footage forced me to reshape

my philosophical approach to film. I do not get as attached to the material knowing I could lose

my footage at any moment. My relationship with my film is fleeting. Through this

uncertainty, I gained a new flexibility: chance and change.

I primarily worked with printer stocks during this time: 7302, 7362, and 7361. I

used printer stock in the camera to achieve the high contrast effect I wanted for the look of

my film. These stocks are not pan-chromatic: I could develop them under a red safelight

in a clear plastic jug and watch the progression of the image. Being able to watch the

development was also advantageous when I was Sabattiering my film. I could match up

one hundred foot rolls of Sabattiered materials that I had done weeks apart. The end result


was matching shots! This visibility allows you to be more spontaneous, more pro-active in

the moment. As an artist, you are able to carve out what you really want on the film.

Through the cracking of the image, I could work with minimal motion, long

take shots, and get additional celluloid motion, which is added onto the 24 frames per second

camera motion. This added motion I would call “mind motion.” The reticulation becomes

the surface interpretation of the channels that the mind goes through in order for you to stare

at any inanimate object for any long period of time. The mind adds the motion in order to

capture your inner attention. This could be a subconscious link-up between you and the

image, or have no relationship whatsoever with the image: perhaps past memories. The

reticulation on film translates this into something visible for the audience, and we actually

see it, the subject, and it, the action.

As a person who is lyrical and poetic in my work, I believe that sound in film is as

important as image. As I show my films to more and more audiences, I realize sound is some-

thing that they can fall back on. The images pass through them in an eye bang or psychedelic

effect. Through music, images work on the mind more effectively. Music is a vehicle for the

audience to see and feel more through. I have found this to be very successful. Of course,

as I more fully mature as an artist, I may find that this is not the case, but my hope is that

this marriage of sound and image will have an even fuller range of possibilities. Right now,

I believe that sound, used in this way, makes the film more accessible to the audience.

The end result of my work is a 14-minute, 56-second sound film titled URBAN

FIRE (1982). This incorporates what I believe is the first sustained reticulated footage in

motion picture film, along with the Sabattier Effect, and all the elements I have previously

mentioned.

This was my beginning.


Carl Brown Urban Fire 1982 16mm film strips Courtesy of the artist.


the aesthetic wow!richard kerr

As life long practitioner and educator of an Avant-Garde cinema, I have been asked to reflect

on the future of cinema. As an educator, I am working with a generation of students whose

central concerns and questions are “What is cinema?” or the more heated debate, “What is

not cinema, or what is cinema’s future?” In fact, what they are asking is “How am I going

to navigate and find my place in the future?” The questions of cinema’s future, I would

suggest, are more tedious than complex.

To survive as a practitioner in the today/tomorrow world of techno-based cinema,

one needs clarity of purpose; confusion leads to loss of time and a softening of ideas and

resolve. I am blessed with an absolute clarity of what cinema is, and therefore, I do not panic:

it is an individual cinema. All the rest, meaning meta-cinemas in all incarnations, are a joyous

ride–a journey through the amusement park-like evolution of what is being presented as a

cinema of today/tomorrow.

(My) cinema, the individual’s cinema, was sharply focused on the American Avant-

Garde (circa 60s/70s): a well critiqued (admittedly limiting and elite) genre of cinema. None-

theless, it was a glorious time to be young, naïve, and curious about a cinema that was defiant

but rigorous (and ambitious about its commitment to “their” cinema’s place in the larger

dialogues of art).

That cinema, which became (my) cinema, opened a path for individuality, question-

ing, and self-cultivation. Personally, (my) cinema was about the pursuit of the Aesthetic

_____

This article was first published in French translation in 24 images: Revue québécoise du cinema, no. 129 (2006).


WOW!: the experience of those life-affirming screening/projections that shaped your muse

and your relationship to your future in cinema. Learning from the battleground of the Avant-

Garde tends to galvanize one’s ideas about what cinema can and cannot be.

(My) cinema in reduction and purity is light, time, and space: rhythm, or the shaping

of time through projected light. Medium specificity, form, structure, and poetics are what

I respond to in any and all cinemas. For sanity’s sake, I must have clarity and resolve in

preparation for what the future of cinema will ask. The anxious questioning of cinema’s

future intensified with the accelerated arrival of digital technology. Only through a daily

practice of engagement with digital technology did it become apparent that this all was new:

new aesthetics, new values. I would be well advised to be clear about what was learned and

true about (my) cinema, but I should be prepared to leave the “old school” and return to the

“new school”... FOREVER! (A Tom Sherman idea, my lesson.)

As a practitioner, I approach questions about cinema’s future through intuitive daily

practice and play with the “new” materials, hybrids, and technologies. It remains true in

practice; the feeling finds the form. There is not a lot of pressure about the future when one

is obsessed and preoccupied with the work before them.

As an educator, this is where the provocation begins. As I stand back and observe

these mythic complexities about cinema’s future, I am compelled to provide an optimism

and enthusiasm for the next generation of practitioners (with some reserve: not about the

direction of cinema itself but the maker’s future). With the right attitude, an understanding

of history, and a clear resolve, the cinema practice of the future looks exciting with unlimited

potential. Gear up! And get makin’… Cinema has always been driven by technology and

the practitioner has always led the way. The unknown issues of cinema’s future are not

in the technology and access, but instead in the values digital technology asks and offers.

With the digital revolution comes a “new” democracy of making. This new democracy comes

with a critical and cultural fragmentation.

Democracy and fragmentation have blown open the playing field: everyone can

be an artist, all voices are legitimate, the critic has gone home, the canon of the past is secure,

and the practitioner can freely play and be risqué (but not risky). Though the pressure to be

popular is on, the pressure for “test of time” quality has eased. In digital cinema practice,

there is no boss and no censor; we are close to the Godardian dream of free authorship.


Freedom of creation is not the issue. The real issue is: what will the practitioner do with all

this techno-induced democracy and freedom of production? Will the future cinema drown itself

in its own noise? Will the system trick us into an empty revolution? My concern is ultimately

not for the future of cinema per se. My concern is about the future of the individual who

produces the future cinema. Know and believe in your individual cinema, and feel blessed

for having a cinema you believe in.


Richard Kerr Demi-Monde 2003 35mm slide show (excerpt) Courtesy of the artist.

'be realistic:

scott mackenzie

Manifestos are typically understood as ruptures, breaks, and challenges to the steady flow of

politics, aesthetics, or history. This is also true of film and other moving image Manifestos.

The necessity to believe that Manifestos are about rupture is part of how they are perceived

to function. And yet a cursory history of film Manifestos finds them pervasive throughout that

history. Indeed, film Manifestos emerged almost as soon as the cinema began. One of the earliest

was short and sharp:

“The cinema is an invention without a future.”–Louis Lumière

One of the key issues raised by film Manifestos is not simply the question as to whether or

not Manifestos can change the cinema, but whether or not calling into being a new form of

cinema will thereby change not only moving images, but the world itself. For this proposition

to make any sense at all, one cannot take moving images to be separate from the world, or

simply a mirror or reflection of the real. Instead, one must see moving images as a constitutive

part of the real: as images change, so does the rest of the world. This belief runs through the

writings and practices of a startling number of filmmakers, theorists, and agitators: one can

see it in the writings of Dziga Vertov, André Bazin, Laura Mulvey, Jean-Luc Godard, Guy

Debord, Luis Buñuel, Yoko Ono, Alexandre Astruc, Stan Brakhage, Lars von Trier and Keith

Sanborn, to name just a few from across the gamut of filmmaking and theory. And this “secret

history” of film Manifestos has its origins in the Manifestos that emerged with such ferocity

in the 18th century. While manifesto-style writing can be traced back to the American

Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, to Elizabethan pamphleteering and the

demand the impossible,'or, a secret history of film manifestos


works of Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, or even further back to the Old Testament and

the Ten Commandments, the modernist manifesto really begins with Karl Marx. And while

the spirit of the Communist Manifesto haunts everything from Godard to Dogme ‘95, it is most

certainly Marx’s posthumously published “Theses on Feuerbach” that sits at a nodal point in

understanding the function of the manifesto and its role in intervening in the public sphere,

summarized in thesis number 11: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various

ways; the point is to change it.”

But how can images change the world in this way? The images called into being by

Manifestos over the last hundred or so years certainly point to the fact that the images that circulate

in the dominant and alternative public spheres do not function in a programmatic, unilinear

manner, no matter what the intentions of various filmmakers and theorists postulate. Most

infamously, Luis Buñuel noted of the bourgeois response in France to Un chien Andalou, his

1928 collaboration with Salvador Dalí, “What can I do about the people who adore all that is

new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press,

and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than

a desperate impassioned call for murder?” Here, Buñuel’s intentions were not fulfilled.

While it is the case that film Manifestos often don’t end up calling into being the new

political, social, cultural, or aesthetic world envisioned by filmmakers, there are other ways in

which the radical ruptures that new forms of cinema inspired by Manifestos fundamentally

change the way in which film and therefore culture is understood. Two brief examples: first,

a film manifesto written by the Italian Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, who in 1936 wrote

one of the most influential film Manifestos of all, which accomplished nothing less than change

the course of European and North American cinema. If he’s off your radar, not to worry: he’s

better known by his nom de plume, Pope Pius XI. Pius XI wrote Vigilanti Cura, a Papal

encyclical on the motion picture in praise of the arrival of the “Legion of Decency,” and deploring

the sinful nature of most cinema. These edicts to a large degree determined the kinds of images

that would be seen on American (and therefore world) screens. One should also not under-

estimate the impact of Vigilanti Cura on European cinemas as both Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle

Thief (1948) and Roberto Rossellini’s L‘Amore (1948) were attacked by Catholics in light of this

encyclical and the movements that sprung from it. Vigilanti Cura also outlined what the moral

implications were of watching “condemned” films for ones’ soul. Like the far better known

modernist Manifestos, this text was a call to arms–though in this case for devout, rightwing Catholics.


Second example: It’s a truism that many of the key film Manifestos were written in France,

the capital of cinéphilia. And out of the plethora of Manifestos that emerged from this scopo-

philic hotbed, the one which has had the longest impact on film studies, film theory, and

indeed on contemporary film directors, is François Truffaut’s 1953 screed “Une certaine

tendance dans le cinema français,” the launch pad of not only auteur theory, but also of the

nouvelle vague. Inspired in part by Astruc’s “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: La

caméma-stylo” from 1948, “Une certaine tendance…”–and Truffaut’s other early writings

on “la politique des auteurs”–were written as polemics, yet went on to influence the way in

which the academic study of film developed in both North America and Britain, inspiring

everyone from Andrew Sarris in New York, to the Movie collective in Britain, to the young

generation of scholars who came of age in the early 1970s and developed a potent synthesis

of semiotics, structuralism, and auteurship into what came to be known as Screen theory.

Yet film Manifestos were not simply the provenance of writers concerned with

narrative and art cinema. In the 1950s and 60s, there was an explosion of Manifestos, state-

ments of first principles, and rants in general that argued for new, alternative, and contestatory

forms of cinema. A key example here is the Free Cinema movement in England, spearheaded

by British film critic, filmmaker, and enfant terrible Lindsay Anderson. Free Cinema emerged

as a means by which to screen works–in this case short fiction and documentary films–which

would not be seen otherwise on British screens, as many of the films dealt with the working

classes of England. By creating a movement, Anderson generated publicity for the film

screenings, gaining them an audience they would not of otherwise had. Free Cinema also tied

into the mid 50s, post-war zeitgeist of Britain, presaging as it does the “Angry Young Men”

theatrical and literary movement that brought working class voices (and accents) to English

mainstream culture.

Other movements were far more polysemic, for instance the New American Cinema

movement of the late 1950s and early 60s. The differences between the Kuchar Brothers’

8mm manifesto, Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, Anger’s writings on film as magikal

incantation, and the far more structural writings of Tony Conrad on the “flicker film” speak

to the heterogeneity of the American Underground. Yet what united these filmmakers and

their Manifestos is a profound concern with alternative ways of seeing. And underlying

this concern, despite the fairly valid claims that these works were apolitical and ahistorical,

was the conviction that different ways of seeing the cinema meant different ways of


seeing the world, perhaps even the world as it was and not how one, through indoctrination and

ideology, thought they saw it. Indeed, the opening line to Metaphors on Vision points to this in a

dramatic formulation: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejud-

iced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which

must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors

are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can

light create for the untutored eye?” Here, Brakhage is not speaking of the cinema, but of perception

itself; cinema therefore, is just a medium through which to rediscover the process of seeing.

In a different vein, the French Situationist Guy Debord argued that the image had

replaced the more traditional commodity at the heart of capitalism. In his 1968 manifesto

and 1973 film Society of the Spectacle, he states: “The spectacle is not a collection of images;

it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Debord’s thought is picked

up by a new generation of American avant-garde and experimental filmmakers in the 1990s.

Far more concerned with the image “detritus” that surrounds and at times bombards contemporary

culture, filmmakers like Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, and Keith Sanborn produced works that

recycled the detritus images of contemporary culture into found footage films. Sanborn himself

wrote one of the key avant-garde film Manifestos of the time, “Modern All Too Modern” modeled

on the writings of Debord.

And of course recently, Dogme ‘95 has put Manifestos back on the map. And while,

in the first instance, following rules just for the sake of it seems profoundly apolitical and

aesthetically retrograde, rule following as a means of creative liberation has a long tradition in

the cinema. In Notes on the Cinematographer, his 1975 book of aphorisms, which reads like

a manifesto on filmmaking, Robert Bresson notes that one is compelled: “To forge oneself iron

laws, if only in order to obey or disobey them with difficulty.” Rule-following, then, foregrounds

for artists the mechanisms by which they create art and in so doing, recreate and re-imagine the

real–and in so doing their very images become part of that real. Here, the fundamental role of

the manifesto becomes clear: the recombinant real offered by the cinema, and the rules that are

written in Manifestos to guide this practice, are not about changing the nature of the image.

Instead, film Manifestos redress the position of the camera in relation to the pro-filmic event.

This allows one to re-visit not only the object before the camera, but the role of the spectator

viewing the image. As importantly, it questions the role played by the very images circulating

in the larger world in which both the spectator and filmmaker live.


anti-100 years of cinemajonas mekas

As you well know it was God who created this Earth and everything on it. And he thought it

was all great. All painters and poets and musicians sang and celebrated the creation and that

was all OK. But not for real. Something was missing. So about 100 years ago God decided

to create the motion picture camera. And he did so. And then he created a filmmaker and

said, “Now here is an instrument called the motion picture camera. Go and film and celebrate

the beauty of the creation and the dreams of human spirit, and have fun with it.”

But the devil did not like that. So he placed a money bag in front of the camera and

said to the filmmakers, “Why do you want to celebrate the beauty of the world and the spirit

of it if you can make money with this instrument?” And, believe it or not, all the filmmakers

ran after the money bag. The Lord realized he had made a mistake. So, some 25 years later,

to correct his mistake, God created independent avant-garde filmmakers and said, “Here is

the camera. Take it and go into the world and sing the beauty of all creation, and have fun

with it. But you will have a difficult time doing it, and you will never make any money with

this instrument.”

Thus spoke the Lord to Viking Eggeling, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Fernand

Leger, Dmitri Kirsanoff, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Cavalcanti,

Jean Cocteau, and Maya Deren, and Sidney Peterson, and Kenneth Anger, Gregory

Markopoulos, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Bruce Baillie, Francis Lee, Harry Smith and

manifesto


_____

This text was presented at the American Center in Paris, February 11, 1996 and first published as a large format, 8-page artist's magazine by agnès b. (Paris, 1996). Thanks to Pip Chodorov for providing his full-length transcription.

Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Ron Rice, Michael Snow, Joseph Cornell, Peter

Kubelka, Hollis Frampton and Barbara Rubin, Paul Sharits, Robert Beavers, Christopher

Maclaine, and Kurt Kren, Robert Breer, Dore O, Isidore Isou, Antonio De Bernardi, Maurice

Lemaître, and Bruce Conner, and Klaus Wyborny, Boris Lehman, Bruce Elder, Taka Iimura,

Abigail Child, Andrew Noren and too many others. Many others all over the world. And they

took their Bolexs and their little 8mm and Super 8 cameras and began filming the beauty of

this world, and the complex adventures of the human spirit, and they're having great fun doing

it. And the films bring no money and do not do what's called useful.

And the museums all over the world are celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary

of cinema, costing them millions of dollars the cinema makes, all going gaga about their

Hollywoods. But there is no mention of the avant-garde or the independents of our cinema.

I have seen the brochures, the programs of the museums and archives and cinema-

theques around the world.

But these say, “we don't care about your cinema.” In the times of bigness, spectaculars,

one hundred million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small, invisible acts

of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the clean lights.

I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor,

etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when

everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily

tailor to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make

no contemporary history, art history or any other history. I am for art which we do for each

other, as friends.

I am standing in the middle of the information highway and laughing, because a

butterfly on a little flower somewhere in China just fluttered its wings, and I know that the

entire history, culture will drastically change because of that fluttering. A Super 8mm camera

just made a little soft buzz somewhere, somewhere on the lower east side of New York, and

the world will never be the same.

The real history of cinema is invisible history: history of friends getting together,

doing the thing they love. For us, the cinema is beginning with every new buzz of the projector,

with every new buzz of our cameras. With every new buzz of our cameras, our hearts jump

forward my friends.


manifestoassociation for film art (AfFA)

Film art is not market-oriented. Film artists are engaged in art-making, not in the production

of mass-market commodities.

Film art creates new, autonomous uses for the medium, distinct from the functions of

entertainment, education and communication that drive the commercial image industries

(though it is frequently educational, entertaining and communicative!).

What is generally considered “entertainment” feels to us like a dreary grind. We look for

innovation, directness, indirection, real character and vision in the moving image.

The film artist is free to redesign filmmaking and film viewing procedures from the ground up,

creating novel conditions of production and reception alike. We reserve the right to alter or

reject any standardized aspect of the film experience, from the film emulsion and camera

to the theatre, projector and projection screen.


_____

The Association for Film Art writes, “As part of our mandate, AfFA is not opposed to other moving-image media, but it firmly believes that the rich history and potential of film should not be abandoned or ignored because of changes in the commercial image industry. Filmmakers are not nostalgic–like other artists working in media with long histories, such as painting and printmaking, they are living and creating NOW. Film has a special place in the world and will continue to do so. We champion film as a personal or collective art form that is practiced independent of the narrow aesthetic, ideological and technical para-meters of the corporate movie business.”

As an audio-visual art form, film should be considered alongside other such forms. Film art

frequently has more in common with painting, poetry, photography, video art, or installation

art than with mainstream movies and television. As such, it should be included, with respect

for its specific characteristics and history, in the exhibition programs of cultural institutions

such as art galleries and museums.

Film was THE art of the twentieth century. All contemporary art has been and is still being

made under the conscious or unconscious influence of cinematic form and content. Much

contemporary art directly references or uses film.

From the very beginnings of film, there have been experimental films by artists such as: Georges

Méliès, Alice Guy, Edwin S. Porter, Emile Cohl, Luis Buñuel, Fernand Léger & Dudley

Murphy, Viking Eggeling, Germaine Dulac, Man Ray, Dziga Vertov, Ogino Shigeji, Hans

Richter, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, Margaret

Tait, Jordan Belson, Kurt Kren, Andy Warhol, Artavazd Pelechian, Michael Snow, Joyce

Wieland, Malcolm LeGrice and David Rimmer, to name just a few. And now, today, a

myriad of filmmakers in Canada and around the world are engaged in the creation of film art.

In just over a century, film has achieved a great history intertwined with makers and concepts

in the larger history of art.

We believe in knowing history and tradition, which point the way to new art.

Film art sets you free as viewer and as maker. Society needs more film art!


Signed (for AfFA),

Scott Berry, Executive Director, Images Festival; Board Member, Pleasure Dome; filmmaker

Gerda Cammaer, filmmaker; Assistant Professor, Department of Image Arts, Ryerson

University

Mary Daniel, film & video artist

Chris Gehman, filmmaker; curator; Board of Directors, Images Festival

Tracy German, filmmaker; P/T Professor, Sheridan College

Ilana Gutman, Professor, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning; member

of LOOP Collective; Board of Directors, AluCine Latin Film Festival; filmmaker

Philip Hoffman, filmmaker; Associate Professor, Department of Film, York University

John Kneller, filmmaker; film instructor, Sheridan College

Jeffrey Paull, retired Professor, Sheridan College

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, PhD candidate, York University and Ryerson University Joint

Programme in Communication and Culture; Course Director, Ryerson University; filmmaker;

member of LOOP collective

John Price, filmmaker; educator, Humber College; IATSE local 667 International Cinema-

tographers Guild member

Barbara Sternberg, filmmaker

Karyn Sandlos, filmmaker; educator

Tom Taylor, Director, Pleasure Dome (Artists Film & Video Exhibition Group)

Mike Zryd, Assistant Professor, Department of Film, York University; President, Film Studies

Association of Canada


manifestothe league

Art is for everyone.

Come and go as you please!

Art in the public square, not the private gallery.

Collaboration over hierarchy!

Cooperation over competition!

Process over product!

Art is spontaneous and fun!

Art is Craft!

Craft is Art!


The League Photo Credit: John Porter.


the horizontalist manifesto /atelier national du manitoba

WE call ourselves l’Atelier-National du Manitoba–to distinguish ourselves from the ‘Canadian

filmmakers’–this horde of rag-pickers which makes good business out of its old rags.

WE declare the new films, the ‘Hollywood-North’ ones, the banal ones and others of this

kind–are leprous.

--don’t go too near them!

--turn your eyes from them!

--they are deadly!

--danger of infection!

WE maintain the future of the art of Manitoba film lies in the disregard of these fabrications.

The death of ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding-Cinema’ is necessary for the survival of true

Manitoba film art.

WE appeal to hasten its death.

NOUS croyons que Pierre Falardeau est le seul cinéaste qui a correctement représenté la

culture anglophone du Canada. Pierre Falardeau est invité à rendre une visite officielle à

l’Atelier à n’importe quel moment convenable.

les horizontalistes: manifeste


_____

Written Janvier 2005.

WE educate the New Manitoba Man. The New Man, freed of his hoop-jumping and Morley-

Walker-sychophance, in the role of Cultural Officer will be an artistic génie unto-hisself.

The New Man, in scholarship upon the banks of the Assiniboine, will engage the Good

Cinema–in creation, appreciation, and harvest.

WE reject the cool malice of hand-held camera images. In staunch defiance, WE wish to

resurrect the leering, high-speed zoom-in from the lonesome grave where it still festers,

somewhere in late 1960s.

WE compose ciné-poems about our civic prison of misery.

WE believe in the narrative perfection that lies within the abstracted limelight underneath the

scratch films of Stan Brakhage, the single frame savagery of Bruce Conner, the absurdist

stuttering of Martin Arnold, the obsessive Super-8 of Robert Morin and the meticulous geo-

metries of Norman McLaren. WE wish to infect our dramatic plots with the formalist energies

of these disfigured children of cinema.

WE feel cheated and unsatisfied when movies attempt to ingratiate themselves with punch

lines and surprise endings–in the age of irony, there are no punch lines.

WE are inspired by the Wagonwheel and aurora borealis.

WE believe that every frame of film and every whisper of sound must be dehumanized beyond

belief through the use of hand processing, Super-8 to 16mm blow-ups, Xerox photocopiers,

desynchornized shutter speeds and optical printing. The use of video is encouraged provided

that it is recorded on low-fi VHS cassette cameras characteristic of the early 1980s and then

transferred and re-transferred ad infinitum from one VHS tape to another and back again.

Digital technology (that scourge of Dogme!) is hateful, but Betamax may win amnesty on the

condition that it too is subject to generational decomposition. Only in this way can cinema

achieve the depth of self-loathing and self-destruction worthy of its new homeland in

Winnipeg.


WE dazzle the snowflakes with our projectors.

WE recognize the masters and their contributions. Monty Hall! Fred Penner! Burton Cummings!

Bill Mosienko! Doug Henning! Bill Norrie! Nick Hill! These, the pariahs of phosphorescent

Winnipeg stardom–agitate the permafrost and witness its lambent glow!

NOUS proposons de vivre dans un Manitoba possible, un Manitoba qui s’est fait perdu quelque

part dans les nuages du passé; un Manitoba qui aurait pu été (un Manitoba qui aurait dû été!)

s’il n’a pas ratté son rendez-vous avec histoire à la fin du 19e siècle. NOUS avons décidé

d’habiter dans ce Manitoba-là et nous rêvons du jour où la langue anglaise s’éffondra une fois

pour toutes. It is our sincere hope that Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s bilingualism policy secretly

aimed to destroy the English language, for we believe this is a resolutely good thing.

WE demand:

--away

from the formal bouquet-throwing of the empty ‘contemporary Canadian’ film; from the

claws of imitative, careerist cinematic hucksters; from the sweet hugs of opportunistic critics

and proclaimed authorities of movie.

--away

into the field of cultural introspection and civic self-loathing; toward the construction of film

community worth its weight in Nips; closer to the Filmic Eucharist.

Notre lutte est une lutte de liberté et de l’indépendence. Notre pays, la vraie patrie de notre

Manitoba, c’est le Québec, pas le Canada. Nous avons confiance, qu’un jour, il y aura un

rendez-vous normal avec histoire que le Québec tiendra, et nous avons confiance que le

Manitoba sera là avec lui, ensemble, pour y assister.

M. Rankin

W. Forsberg



Atelier national du Manitoba Top: Atelier founding members, Matthew Rankin and Walter Forsberg, in Montreal. Photo credit: Cristina Brickman. Middle: Rankin and Forsberg, in Winnipeg. Photo credit: Melissa Forsberg. Bottom: Atelier member Mike Maryniuk. Photo credit: Jennifer Stillwell.

winnipeg eats itself:

solomon nagler

There has been much speculation as to why such a unique filmmaking community has emerged

from the Winnipeg Film Group, an infamous filmmaking cooperative founded over 30 years

ago in the world’s coldest city.2 Drowned by sky and isolated by an ocean of wheat fields,

filmmakers from this island city developed an edgy, original sense of Cinema that can be

recognized the world over as distinctly Winnipeg. Common approaches and concerns for

storytelling and image-taking emerge and subsequently reinvent themselves in the shadows of

legendary Film Group alumni such as Guy Maddin and John Paizs. Recently, l’Atelier national

du Manitoba has emerged as Winnipeg’s Nouvelle Vague. Breaching the radically individualistic

and competitive habits of previous generations, l’Atelier creates work collectively. Composed

of cineastes, archivists and visual artists, its agenda is overtly political and expands outside

the cinema through various forms of subversive street art projects. Inside the theatre, its

work incorporates established themes of prairie postmodernism, such as an obsession for

ruined or damaged moving images (both celluloid and video based), ironic historicism,

self-hatred, and narcissism. Pitting Winnipeg against itself, the collective creates nationalistic,

sociopolitical, culture-jamming documents that explore the esoteric roots of Canada's

other distinct society: Winnipeg, Manitoba.

l'atelier national du manitoba's

>> Winnipeg is not a city. It is a form of irony.1

scheme for sovereignty


L’Atelier was concocted by Mathew Rankin, a former Winnipeg ex-pat who received most

of his film training in Quebec and Iran, and Walter Forsberg, an American whose initial

exposure to Winnipeg was as a programmer at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

L’Atelier’s fluctuating membership currently includes Rankin and Forsberg, as well as the

local filmmakers Mike Maryniuk, Alek Rzeszowski, Eve Majzels, and Darryl Nepinak.

Together they create projects under the banner of l’Atelier, as well as independent, self-

authored works. Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (2006) was their

inaugural collaboration. It is a media-collage tour de force, an overture that reveals its

political purpose: uncovering the roots of Winnipeg’s distinct society by sifting through the

ruins of its discarded visual history. Death by Popcorn is an allegorical study that re-

considers a tenuous time in Winnipeg’s history. The city had just lost its precious National

Hockey League team, The Jets, and, consequently, was on the brink of a third mass uprising.

Along with Les Québécois and Les Acadiens, Manitobans are another regional

minority who have instigated several violent revolts against the Canadian federal government.

The first was the failed Red River rebellion of 1869, when Louis Riel tried to establish a New

Jerusalem in what is now known as St. Vital, a bustling suburb, housing Winnipeg’s largest

and most successful shopping mall.4 The second was the General strike of 1919, during which

the city’s various labor groups joined forces to stage a violent protest against labor conditions

imposed by the bourgeoisie working for Eastern Canadian companies. The most recent flaring

of Winnipeg’s nationalistic temperament came in 1995 during the politically volatile month

of May. 30,000 Winnipegers marched along the same paths as the Winnipeg General Strike

demanding an end to the capitalistic ruin of Canada’s national sport and imploring NHL

executives to “Save our Jets.” Death by Popcorn does not attempt to clearly depict that moment

in Winnipeg’s history. Instead, it is an experimental, historical mélange, aiming to explore

Winnipeg’s peculiar national characteristics. These include a perpetual, narcissistic self-hatred,

a subsequent obsession with finding a new Riel-type messianic leader to alleviate this self-

hatred, an incessant need to demand a bargain on everything from furniture to civic infra-


WE call ourselves l’Atelier-National du Manitoba–to distinguish ourselves from the ‘Canadian filmmakers’–this horde of rag-pickers which makes good business out of its old rags. […]

WE compose ciné-poems about our civic prison of misery.3

structure, and the tendency of Winnipeg filmmakers to create work that incorporates textured,

self-referential, expressionistic images.

Death By Popcorn draws its source material from discarded Beta-format videotapes

that were rescued from a dumpster by l’Atelier members. The city’s unforgiving natural

elements took their toll on this fragile media; consequently, the images incorporated in the

film are mere textured traces of their past Betamax glory. From this material, L’Atelier stitched

together a compelling, fragmented history: an epic tale that descends into tragedy as Winnipeg’s

hockey heroes become powerless against their foes. The film traces the rise and fall of this

once-promising hockey team, and the sense of failure that later permeated the city as their

team perpetually lost to its arch nemesis: Wayne Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers.

As the sordid tale unfolds, Death by Popcorn’s textured fragments gain a manic

momentum of turmoil and urgency. L’Atelier enlists the talents of civic luminaries such

as Kern Hill Furniture Co-op magnate Nick Hill, whose howling television commercials

became an anthem to Winnipeg bargain hunting rituals. Mustache bearing sportscasters

wearing neon spandex biking shorts do their best to placate the maddening crowd, while

pierogi tycoon Hunky Bill distracts the crowd with 30-second pierogi making lessons. Death

by Popcorn’s use of seemingly insignificant local commercials is perhaps its most fascinating

feature. In the philosophical spirit of Walter Benjamin, l’Atelier sifts through the ruins of

community access and local television programs, weaving together fragments of outdated

media in order to uncover an authentic portrait of the Winnipeg Nation.5

The film also introduces what has since become an Atelier obsession and infamous

trademark: the messianic depiction of Burton Cummings, former front man to ‘60s rock band,

The Guess Who. The filmmakers expose Cummings as he casts himself as the Jets’ redeeming

savior. Playing the role of Doubting Thomas, l’Atelier edit together video documentation of

a promotional photo shoot with this pseudo Louis Riel; degraded Beta tapes show him struggling

with his hockey gear and stumbling as he skates in the now demolished Winnipeg Arena, all

the while sermonizing to a temperamental nation of isolated skeptics. Death by Popcorn

concludes with the team’s inevitable sale to a larger, more significant urban center: Phoenix.

The clincher in this tragic tale is that, after almost becoming a Jet in 1979,6 and after the team

had been torn from its adoring homeland, Gretzky, bankrolled by big-bucks Arizona business-

men, bought the Winnipeg franchise and later became the team’s head coach.


Winnipeg’s particular style of cinematic experimentation assimilates formal techniques

developed by other Canadian experimental film practitioners, fusing them into a coherent

narrative framework to create a unique, indigenous storytelling style. L’Atelier's investi-

gation of Winnipeg’s sociopolitical history draws on and expands upon the cinematic

tradition of prairie postmodernism. Coined by eastern Canada’s filmmaking elite, the term

“prairie postmodern” describes a style of filmmaking that emerged in the early 1980s, initially

through the early works of John Paizs.8 Paizs’ short film series The Three Worlds of Nick

(1981-1984) and his feature film masterpiece Crime Wave (1985), established not only a

postmodern aesthetic, but also one of self-consciousness and paranoia. Paizs’ work has been

categorized as postmodern because of its overt sense of ironic historicism, which accentuates

the structure of his films. In Springtime in Greenland (1981), Paizs directs particular scenes

as though he’s shooting a postwar propaganda newsreel, extolling the virtues of sterile sub-

urban living. He enlists an overtly callous, dry narrator to evoke a sense of doubt within the

dramatic elements of the film. Scenes are filmed in tableau-like perfection, mocking both

the events within the film and the act of filmmaking itself. Paizs’ omnipresent sense of irony

suggests that all his characters are explicitly conscious of the heavily constructed scenarios.

In many of his early works, Paizs casts himself as protagonist, thereby introducing a style of

diary filmmaking that emerged as a popular experimental documentary genre in eastern

Canada. His films include an element of personal mythology, which subsequently became

a crucial idiosyncrasy of Winnipeg filmmaking, particularly in the work of Guy Maddin and

l’Atelier.9 Paizs also pioneered a unique form of first person cinema, a term Winnipegers

like to call “bargain basement filmmaking.” This method is considered by members of

l’Atelier to be an enshrined Winnipeg ordinance. For example, Paizs shot most of his films

himself, with a crew that seldom exceeded three, using a Bolex camera that had to be wound

by hand.


Everybody has self-destructive impulses but Winnipeg’s are more developed than most. The people of Winnipeg are perpetually committing acts of genocide upon their own heritage, rubbing out all traces of their own history, and consigning their civilization to the forgotten mists of time.

7

L’Atelier’s obsession with partially ruined visual materials can also be seen as a mannerism

inherited from previous generations of prairie auteurs. Degraded celluloid that looks

discovered rather than created and beaten Beta tapes that have lost most of their magnetic

resonance are yet another means of expressing the ironic historicism of the prairie postmodern.

Guy Maddin was the first filmmaker to expand Winnipeg’s omnipresent sense of irony from

the dramatic structure of Paizs to the actual material of celluloid itself. Maddin's expressionistic

style is reminiscent of “primitive cinema,” where the boundaries between dramatic and

experimental filmmaking are less defined. His work can be considered a rewriting of Canada’s

inexistent early cinema history.11 Films such as Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988),

Archangel (1990), and Careful (1992) portray characters struggling with the fuzzy, high-

contrast film material that has brought them to life. Words are spoken out of sync and gestures

become unrecognizable, blurring into abstract forms of pure light. By creating a series of

witty experimental narratives within an expressionistic style reminiscent of the 1920s, Maddin

inspired evolution in Winnipeg’s self-reflexive cinema. Instead of utilizing a sterile, self-

conscious mise-en-scène, Maddin introduced a cinema of ruins, where structural fabrications

of the filmmaking process are made self-evident through deteriorated photographic material.

WE believe in the narrative perfection that lies within the abstracted limelight underneath the scratch films of Stan Brakhage, the single frame savagery of Bruce Conner, the absurdist stuttering of Martin Arnold, the obsessive Super-8 of Robert Morin and the meticulous geo-metries of Norman McLaren. WE wish to infect our dramatic plots with the formalist energies of these disfigured children of cinema.

12

L’Atelier’s goal in its various film- and art-making projects is to expose the roots of Winnipeg’s

ironic self-reflexive cinema. The film theorist and eastern Canadian filmmaker Bruce Elder

has written a fascinating exploration of the self-reflexive tendencies of Canadian filmmaking

in his book Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989). He claims

that Canada’s unique experimentations in cinema emerge from a particularly ominous relation-


The discount is to Winnipeg what soccer is to Brazil and police reports indicate time and again that Winnipeg’s notoriously prolific homicide rate is due mainly to bargain-relateddisputes

10

ship between Canadians and their imposing geography. Examining both philosophical and

cinematic trends, he claims that an overwhelming (and seemingly unknowable and mysterious)

landscape induced a sense of fear and self-consciousness.This landscape also created a dualistic

approach to filmmaking, “according to which reality is made up partly of mental stuff and

partly of physical stuff, with the two entirely different from one another.”13According to

Elder, this is what accounts for a certain type of postmodernism prevalent in Canadian

cinema, whereby elements within the films themselves always become contextualized by the

actual process of filmmaking. This stylistic movement resulted in unique formal experiments

by filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Jack Chambers, and artists associated with Quebec’s

Cinéma Direct movement. Elder’s assessment can also be used to account for the unique

evolution of prairie postmodern cinema. Similar structural characteristics emerge within

the films of Paisz and Maddin, particularly their emphasis on the structural limitations of

the act of filmmaking, and its integration into the dramatic elements within the films.

The impact of Canada’s Great Plains on Winnipeg’s mindset is undeniable. It is a

city drowned by its landscape, stranded by unbearable winters, and plagued by mosquitoes

in the summer. To combat the civic doubt induced by such an inhospitable climate, various

municipally funded promotional campaigns have been developed, aiming to instill widespread

“Winnipeg Pride.” These campaigns, which always inevitably fail, have become another

target of l’Atelier’s culture jamming projects. They mimic the city’s public poster campaigns

with their own unsolicited banners and murals. Posters with the words “Stand Tall” scrolled

underneath a high contrast print of Burton Cummings’ smiling, mustached face and iconic

portraits of the late Nick Hill exclaiming “Discount Everything” foster an alternative,

authentic sense of civic pride. For l’Atelier, the only authentic image is a ruined image and,

as such, they believe that publicly funded initiatives, such as the “Love Me Love My

Winnipeg” jingle contest and the “Winnipeg: 100 Reasons to Love It” campaign, which were

both created in the late ‘80s to alleviate Winnipeg's endemic self-hatred, are nonsensical and

futile. Rather, Winnipeg’s self-hatred must be unearthed and embraced through an alternative

aesthetic exploration that includes sifting through the disastrous consequences of Winnipeg's

destructive tendencies. L’Atelier’s political agenda is to stand by while the remnants from

these perfect failures are tossed into Winnipeg's national dumpster. Allowing the harsh

reality of the world’s coldest city to take its toll on the material, they then sift through the


garbage looking for a perfect fragment that will become ideal fodder for their textured

collages.

Emphasizing their conviction that “history is written by the losers,” l’Atelier’s new projects

aim to expand its agenda of exploring Winnipeg’s distinct national characteristics in fragments.

I Dream of Driftwood (2007) is part of a series of l’Atelier Super 8 cityscape commissions.

These films investigate Winnipeg’s urban landscape through degraded, textured, celluloid

images. Winnipeg’s architectural configuration provides the most palpable morsels of its

unique peculiarities. An established metropolis at the turn of the 20th Century, Winnipeg

was once known as the gateway to the west, with architecture rivaling Chicago’s. As

Canada expanded and depended less on railway transportation, Winnipeg’s booming metropolis

went bust. Now enormous art deco warehouses and antique skyscrapers stand vacant and

ignored. Subsequent urban renewal projects that never really took hold resemble awkward

scars on an abandoned cityscape.

A poignant example is the Esplanade Riel bridge debacle. Etienne Gaboury, a

Manitoba born descendant of Louis Riel, created a beautiful pedestrian bridge to connect

Winnipeg’s French and English districts. Penny-pinching Winnipegers were initially con-

vinced that the 22 million dollar bridge would be worth the money, for this architectural

marvel would, without a doubt, restore the big city panache taken from them when they lost

their hockey team. However, when it was discovered that a 1 million dollar toilet was being

installed for a high-end restaurant on the bridge, Winnipeg nearly erupted into a full-blown

riot. To appease this outrage, the city called on its modern-day Riel, Burton Cummings, to

establish an authentic piece of civic culture on the bridge. Instead of the promised high-end

WE believe that every frame of film and every whisper of sound must be dehumanized beyond belief through the use of hand processing, Super-8 to 16mm blow-ups, Xerox photocopiers, desynchronized shutter speeds and optical printing. The use of video is encouraged, provided that it is recorded on low-fi VHS cassette cameras characteristic of the early 1980s and then transferred and re-transferred ad infinitum from one VHS tape to another and back again. Digital technology (that scourge of Dogme!) is hateful, but Betamax may win amnesty on the condition that it too is subject to generational decomp-osition. Only in this way can cinema achieve the depth of self-loathing and self-destruction worthy of its new homeland in Winnipeg.

14


restaurant, the vox populi succeeded in replacing it with a homegrown, fast food establishment

partially owned by Cummings: The Salisbury House. The subsequent red carpet ceremony,

and Cummings’ place in Winnipeg’s sense of self is the subject of l’Atelier’s current work,

Negativipeg.

This new project is equal parts docudrama, public art program, and cable access

talk show. The film centers on Winnipeg’s irreverent behavior towards Cummings, its civic

pride savior. The project takes its name from a particular incident where Cummings tried

to assert his messianic authority during a domestic altercation at a 7-11 convenience store.

While trying to break up the dispute, using his status as a local demigod to mediate the

situation, he was hit on the head with a beer bottle by a drunk Winnipeger. While Cummings

was healing from the incident, a reporter asked him his opinion of the city he had personally

chosen to liberate from its misery. Cummings response: ”Winnerpeg? Try Negativipeg!”

Subsequently, Negativipeg investigates various local attitudes towards Cummings and The

Salisbury House, asking those people interviewed to dramatically reenact the fateful incident

at the 7-11. L’Atelier treats this incident as a pivotal moment in the assertion of Winnipeg’s

national identity, the golden calf to Moses’ descent (with Slurpees in hand). They depict the

confrontation as a smashing of the idols, kicking the medicine man out of town, or eating a

burger to spite the mad cow. L’Atelier supplements the film component of Negativipeg through

a barrage of illegal street art projects, plastering the Winnipeg cityscape with their “Stand Tall”

banners. This caption is not only a reference to the famous ballad written by Winnipeg's prodigal

son; it also signifies Winnipeg's need for salvation from its civic misery, a need to convince

itself that all its suffering is warranted, and that soon another Riel figure will emerge to

realize its dreams of sovereignty.

Notre lutte est une lutte de liberté et d'indépendence. Notre pays, la vraie patrie de notre Manitoba, c’est le Québec, pas le Canada. Nous avons confiance, qu’un jour, il y aura un rendez-vous avec l'histoire et le Québec, et nous avons confiance aussi que le Manitoba sera là avec lui, ensemble, pour y assister.

15

(Our fight is a fight of freedom and independence. Our country, the true fatherland of our Manitoba, is Quebec, not Canada. We have faith that one day there will be an appointment with history which Quebec will hold, and we have faith that Manitoba will be there with Quebec to assist.)


Notes

1. L’Atelier national du Manitoba, “The Seven Pillars of Atelier Aide-Mémoire on the Cinematic Form of the Winnipeg Jets,” notations by Matthew Rankin, BlackFlash 23, no. 3 (2006): 26. This is an excerpt from an annotated list of seven rules the Atelier posted on their editing room wall while completing Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (2006).

2. According to Environment Canada, the federal department in charge of weather statistics and analysis, Winnipeg is the world’s coldest city with a population over 600,000. See http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/weather/winners/highlights-e.html

3. This is an excerpt from “The Horizontalist Manifesto / Les Horizontalistes: manifeste,” written by l’Atelier national du Manitoba in January 2005. The manifesto is published for the first time elsewhere in this volume.

4. Louis Riel’s religious convictions are particularly well documented in his collected journals. See Louis Riel, The Diaries of Louis Riel, ed. Thomas Flanagan (Edmonton: Hurtig Press, 1976), p. 169.

5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 258.

6. One of the major dramatic threads of Death by Popcorn is a fateful game of backgammon the Jets’ owner Barry Shenkarow nearly played for Gretzky’s contract as he entered the NHL. However, Shenkarow passed on the game and Gretzky became property of the Edmonton Oilers instead.

7. L’Atelier national du Manitoba, “The Seven Pillars of Atelier Aide-Mémoire,” 26.

8. The term “prairie postmodern” gained in popularity with the broadcast of a television profile of the Winnipeg Film Group. The profile, created by the CBC National News, first appeared on The Journal on July 4, 1991.

9. This is particularly evident in Guy Maddin’s first film, The Dead Father (1985), and in his recent return to more autobiographical work, such as Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and My Winnipeg (2008). L’Atelier’s obsession with uncovering Winnipeg lore can also be seen as an extension of the local obsession with personal mythology.

10. L’Atelier national du Manitoba, “The Seven Pillars of Atelier Aide-Memoire,” 25.

11. This idea was explored in the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (Noam Gonick, 1997).

12. L’Atelier national du Manitoba, “The Horizontalist Manifesto.”

13. Bruce Elder, Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989), p. 29.

14. L’Atelier national du Manitoba, “The Horizontalist Manifesto.”

15. Ibid. My translation.


Leslie Supnet Hand Cranked VHS 2007 ink on paper


manifestodouble negative collective

The palliative tendencies of conventional cinema configure audience as patient, filmmaker as

pharmacist. The patient arrives, wearily, with his prescription, ready for the cure. The pharm-

acist officiates, moralizes on proper usage and dosage, translates the cryptic scribbles. He

reminds the patient to get plenty of sleep.

The pharmacist keeps regular hours, closed on Sundays.

The alchemist has no such customers, or concerns. The alchemist looks for the illumination

of base objects; she communicates telepathically with other practitioners; she wakes late in the

day, wondering, “did I really?” remembering the brief, dark glow cast against the laboratory

wall.

With the common goal of exploration through moving images, 12 Montreal-based artists have

conspired to become the Double Negative Collective.

We find ourselves in the role of the alchemist: we promote accidents, discoveries, and failures;

processes that lead into unknown landscapes; the fleeting tangibility of mystical and trans-

formative forces; and the begetting of delicate, precious objects in the dark.

_____

Written in 2004.


We locate cinema in human experience, in the eye, hand and heartbeat, not in the worn-out

tropes that pass for meaning and feeling in conventional moviemaking.

We find mystery in processes: in materials, in ideas and in the world. The untutored,

discovering camera is the prism we have found to draw these forces together.

We are choosing, through experiments in form, voice and vision, to initiate a dialogue long-

neglected in the independent artist-based filmmaking community: a benevolent conspiracy

of ideas. For this, we have gone back to the roots of the media of film and video to ask

questions and seek answers.

We provide no prescription for what film ought to be, but elucidate what it is: impossible

pasts and futures in a trajectory of unraveling present, images pausing and passing from

somewhere up there, in the back of the head.


against the current:

brett kashmere

An electric presence on Montreal’s emergent experimental film scene, Karl Lemieux has been

composing artistically adventurous time-based media since the late-90s. His first project, a

video interpretation of Lee Ranaldo’s talking sound-piece “The Bridge” (1985), made while

attending high school in the Nevada desert, foreshadows Lemieux’s recent projector perform-

ances with live musicians. Deeply influenced by Québécois animator Pierre Hébert’s inter-

disciplinary film practice and mirroring his artistic trajectory, Lemieux explored hand-

painting in Motion of Light (2004) before embracing the more aleatory possibilities of

expanded cinema.

In 2006, Lemieux began an ongoing series of performances with the musician

Radwan Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) that brought Lemieux’s cameraless filmmaking

techniques into the live arena. Orchestrating an assortment of hand-processed 16mm film

loops through a suite of aged Eikis, Lemieux bleaches and paints filmstrips seconds before

they hit the gate. Visually manifesting the intensity of Moumneh’s dense, chamber-style

guitar, the violently handled and ruined film loops come close to the point of cathartic self-

destruction. Lemieux has also collaborated with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor,

A Silver Mt. Zion, Shalabi Effect, Arcade Fire, and Set Fire to Flames, the spoken word artist

and poet Alexis O’Hara, and the artist-musicians Alexandre St. Onge and Jonathan Parant.

In addition to his filmmaking initiatives and collaborations, Lemieux is also the co-

founder of Double Negative, a collective of Montreal film and video artists dedicated to the

a two-part interview with karl lemieux(and daichi saito)


production and exhibition of experimental film. Double Negative’s rising community presence,

coupled with their advocacy of cinema’s wondrous, transformative potential, has provided

Montreal’s independent projection locales with a bolt of positive energy, helping to solidify

a ground for future activity.

I interviewed Lemieux at his home in Montreal’s Plateau district in summer 2007.

Later we moved up to the Double Negative studio in Mile End, where the collective’s other

founding member, Daïchi Saïto joined us.

PART ONE: Personal Work

BK: My first question has to do with collaboration. Do see the projection aspect of your

performances working together with the music in a kind of ensemble way, or do you see it

(approach it) as something more autonomous. Do you think of the image–the projection–

as musical in any way?

KL: I guess that’s the way it started for me. I’ve never been a musician or seriously learned

to play an instrument, but, to some extent, I prefer music to film. It’s something I wish I could

share in. Especially the improvisational part, where the musicians get together and communicate

by sound. They respond to each other and create this whole thing all together. I think that’s

what brought me to performance, because it involves controlling an instrument. But instead

of sound rhythms or sound vibrations its light rhythms and the physical experience of light.

The music brings something to the image, and the image brings something to the

sound, and altogether it becomes a piece. Also, I’ve seen a lot of concerts with extremely

sloppy projection. I can remember a couple of instances where the show starts and there’s

already a Super 8mm loop running. So you’ve already seen the image, and then the band

starts to play a song, the song finishes, and the loop is still running. It doesn’t actually bring

anything to the music, it’s just static: it’s a visual accessory. I think there’s a way to deal with

the projector, to either physically touch the lens, or create a shadow: doing something along

with what’s going on with the music.

BK: In your performances you seem to be working with the projector as an instrument.


Karl Lemieux From top: Lemieux at home in Montreal (Photo credit: Brett Kashmere); performing with Just’au Crane at the Society for Arts and Technology, Montreal (Photo credit: Nicolas Bilodeau); still from Western Sunburn (2007), courtesyof the artist.


KL: I guess. What I do, with the hand-painting part, when I paint over film while it’s running

through the projector, or when I throw bleach on the film while it’s running through, comes

from seeing the work of Pierre Hébert. For instance, the performances he did with a single

16mm projector, where he was taking the loop and placing it on a light table and drawing

on the film directly while it was running–he had maybe three seconds to do something–then

he would take another part and draw on it.

BK: Was this one of his collaborations with Bob Ostertag, or was it prior to that?

KL: It was prior, but I’ve seen one where he would scratch film to Bob’s music. But from

there they moved to the Between Science and Garbage project, shifting completely to digital.

At one point he was mixing digital and film as well. I don’t know how long he did that for.

But he’s been doing projector performances since the 70s, I think. And he’s done many

collaborations with people like Jean Derome and many other musicians, including Fred Frith

and John Zorn in New York.

BK: I’m interested in how you actually produce the footage that you use in the performances.

Do you contact print found footage?

KL: It depends. I like to shoot my own footage as often as I can and manipulate it live. I

have a little collective now with Alexandre St. Onge and Jonathan Parant; we’re planning to

do a series of performances together. All of the footage comes from a weekend we spent in

the countryside. We shot maybe ten rolls of Super 8. In addition to music they also do other

performance work, in the tradition of physical performance art. So I was shooting one of

their performances in the forest. From there I will optically print that material to 16mm, then

contact print and hand-process it, and make loops from it. Those loops are what I use in the

performances.

In the performances with Jerusalem in My Heart [Radwan Moumneh], there are

some handmade filmstrips, either hand-painted or made by transferring imagery from paper

to film. There are also text and flicker strips of film. Some of the footage is based on an Arabic

theme; there’s not much I can shoot here on that theme, so I end up using found footage. Then


I re-photograph, hand-process, contact print, hand-process again, and transfer to hi-con

depending on the footage.

BK: How did you begin working with Radwan?

KL: It started with a performance I did in 2004 for a small art event on the theme of the

Western. I had two reels of an American spaghetti western, probably from the 1920s or 30s.

Maybe it was from Italy, but it had English inter-titles. I liked some of the footage so I decided

to make a short film piece with it. The recording of the sound for the performance wasn’t

exactly what I wanted to use for the edited version of that material. Radwan was my neigh-

bour at the time. At some point he told me if I ever needed sound or music, to just ask him;

he said it would be a pleasure.

BK: Had he seen any of your work prior to that?

KL: Never. [Laughs.] We just got along. But I had seen Jerusalem in My Heart prior to that.

He was doing his solo show of electric guitar and voice. It was extremely beautiful–distorted

guitar with loop pedal. When I arrived the show had already started and it felt like there

were three guitar players on stage. When I realized it was only this one guy I was really

impressed. His music reminded me of Neil Young’s soundtrack for Dead Man [Jim Jarmusch,

1995]. There’s something really beautiful about that improvised guitar. Radwan’s concert had

a similar quality. So I told him I was doing this experimental found footage film with Western

footage, and that I was looking for some kind of free guitar, like the Dead Man soundtrack.

And he was like, “Wow, that’s one of my favorite records. I’d surely be interested in doing

this.” When he first saw the images I was working with he really liked it.

So we first did that short film together, but it took awhile. I actually didn’t finish it

because of some problems at the editing table; I put it on hold. In the meantime he was doing

a show and he asked me to join him, to do a performance for his music. That was the show we

did for the opening of the Silver Mt. Zion concert in 2006. From that point–it might become

a long-term collaboration. We’ve done a couple of shows together; almost every time he plays

I bring the projector.


BK: How many times have you performed together?

KL: It was the third performance that you saw in the summer.

BK: What does your practice routine consist of? Do you rehearse together?

KL: For this collaboration we meet and we show each other our work. He burns me CDs;

I go to the rehearsals. But I don’t actually rehearse with him/them. We just plan a free structure

on which we’ll improvise that night.

We also have a cue system for changes, and things like that. We meet and discuss

what it’s going to be like, but we don’t actually rehearse. I do rehearsals with this other

collective, with Alex [St. Onge] and Jonathan. I rehearse as well with Transylvania. Those

are the three projects I’m mostly involved with these days.

BK: Do the musicians that you play with–Radwan in particular–have any input into the

imagery you use in the performances?

KL: Yeah, absolutely. Of course, I’m totally free to do whatever I want to. But I wouldn’t

just throw any image on the screen. With those three different collaborations, I have a bank

of images for each. Apart from some mutual hand-painted material, or stuff that isn’t related

to any particular theme, I just build on these images banks for each project. And, the music

that they do inspires what I will create for that particular collaboration.

BK: Do you think at all about the meaning of the imagery that you’re using?

KL: As much as I can. For instance, the performance I did opening for [the UK film artist]

Guy Sherwin. There was actually a small technical problem. The filmstrip I wanted to burn

for that final part–

BK: The imagery of the Queen?


KL: Yeah. I was supposed to use something else and it broke right before I could use it. So

I ended up grabbing something else, which I thought was something different than what I

grabbed. [Laughs.] That’s how I ended up burning the Queen for 10 minutes! But actually,

it brought another meaning to that performance. It was kind-of out-of-control at the time.

BK: That’s amazing, because the synthesis of form and content in that performance was

so tight.

KL: That performance went further than anything I did before. With time I gain more and

more control over what I’m doing. It’s easy to fuck up. It’s fragile. I mean, you’re not

supposed to paint on a filmstrip while it’s running in a projector. Fresh paint, not even dry,

goes in the gate and sometimes skips, jams.

BK: You’re not supposed to grab the film while the projector’s running, either.

KL: No no. Destroying the sprockets, it can easily break.

BK: Do you worry about technical failure? And do you have a contingency plan in case

something goes wrong? Is that why you use the four projectors?

KL: Yes, because it’s rare that more than two are running at a time, sometimes three. But

while some are running it allows me to prepare the others. So if something wrong happens,

I have back-ups. It’s happened in the past: a bulb burned out. It put me in an embarrassing

position. I can’t really stop during a performance, but I need to do this change. It requires

back-up.

BK: Do you worry about damaging the equipment that you use?

KL: Not at all: I buy projectors especially for this. I wouldn’t show a clean film print on these

projectors. They’re basically in my hands to be destroyed. [Laughs.] Inevitably, at some

point they will break. I try to keep them in order: I clean them a little bit.


BK: During the performances, I imagine your primary preoccupation is keeping everything

on course, and moving, changing loops and so forth. But are you also aware of how the

audience is responding?

KL: While doing the performance? [Pauses.] No, I try to focus as much as I can on the

response of the musicians. Especially in situations where all of the music is improvised, I

try to listen as much as possible to the sound.

BK: So you’re responding to what the musicians are doing?

KL: As much as the musicians are responding to what’s going on with the image.

BK: There are only so many things that you can adjust or do to the footage while it’s running

through the projector, no?

KL: There are limits. Say I would like to show a specific image at a particular moment, when

something comes in with the music. I need a little time to be able to do that change. Or if I

know a change in the music might be coming, I’ll have the loop prepared on another projector

ready to run. But sometimes it’s a bit off. That’s why a cue system could be very interesting.

I know when to prepare when I have the cue. Then I can tell the musicians that I will soon

be ready, to keep that communication going.

BK: Is the length of a performance predetermined?

KL: Sometimes it is. The most beautiful way to calculate the length is by feeling. We know

intuitively when one part is over. We feel it all together and move towards something else.

When these things happen all together it’s extremely interesting to me; it feels like we’re

connecting and moving towards the same place.

BK: What impresses me most about your performances with Jerusalem In My Heart is their

emotional intensity and “thickness.” The compact duration really reinforces that for me. I


don’t think you could sustain the same feeling over an hour or two hours. That’s what I come

away with, that and the physical aspect of the experience.

KL: Yeah, in the sound especially. Jerusalem In My Heart likes to play loud. There’s also

a drone aspect to what they are doing, so it really becomes physical sound-wise.

BK: What you’re doing is physical, too, and that’s translated into what the viewers are seeing

on the screen, and impacts our emotional response to it. It’s very tactile and haptic.

KL: If I were to try to do the same performance without the sound, it wouldn’t be the same.

The sound gives me an empowering energy. It almost brings me to a state of trance. I can

feel it in my body. Sometimes my hands are almost shaking as I try to keep going with the

work. I realize what’s going on between us–we share something quite powerful. This whole

energy kind-of drives me crazy on the projectors. I don’t know how to explain it exactly.

[Laughs.]

BK: It’s very serious. It has that impact. It’s heavy and intense.

KL: I agree. The funny thing is, the last time we performed, the idea was to turn it into a party.

It was a short performance–it lasted maybe 25 minutes. But it builds up. There was even a

drum machine. When we first started to work on the performance the inspiration was Arabic

pop music, with the beat box and voices: really cheesy stuff. But those guys turned that into

something so serious and overwhelming in emotion. It was quite special to me, because I’ve

been following the work of the musicians involved in that performance for a long time.

BK: Who were some of the other musicians that played that night?

KL: There was the Godspeed You! Black Emperor founder, Efrim Menuck, and Thierry Amar,

one of the main composers of Godspeed. Those two afterwards founded A Silver Mt. Zion.

There was also Jessica Moss, violinist for A Silver Mt. Zion; Eric Craven from Hangedup,

who recently became the drummer for A Silver Mt. Zion; Howard Bilerman, who's the sound

engineer at Hotel2Tango, the studio where all these guys record their albums. He was also the


first Arcade Fire drummer. Will Eizlini, a trumpet player who also does percussion; he's

been playing for many years with the Shalabi Effect; and the percussionist Nader Hasan.

So altogether we were ten people. The big orchestra thing was quite fun. All these people,

I never saw them doing a funny show! [Laughs.] What they do is quite strong in emotion.

BK: It still had a spirit of camaraderie. Even though it was serious and heavy, one could

sense that the performers were enjoying each other’s company.

I’m very excited by the new collaborations that are going on between Montreal’s

experimental filmmakers and musicians. You’re an important hinge, bringing these two scenes

together. It seems there’s more crossover now than there was maybe five years ago.

KL: It did happen back then, but in isolated circumstances. Maybe it’s still like that, I don’t

know. Yeah, there’s something going on now. It’s interesting that this is starting to happen,

because most of these musicians really like experimental film. But they don’t necessarily

know how to get that information, since they’re heavily involved with the music scene; that’s

their main focus. Then you have filmmakers that are in the film world, they don’t know much

about music. But more and more, it seems like both universes are encountering each other.

BK: Tell me about Western Sunburn (2007). Is the imagery in that piece documentation of a

performance, or was it projected and performed to camera to be edited into a finished piece?

KL: I did the performance in September 2004. From that, I had this film loop still in the can.

I liked some of the images a lot. Some were heavily modified with bleach and paint, so there

was something really dirty about it. Some of the images had silhouetted, recognizable figurative

imagery behind that modified, handmade film surface. I knew I wanted to use some of that

to do a piece. The only way to transfer the material was to re-do the performance, because

the documentation of the performance included people watching the show and musicians

playing and the crowd itself, and the camera shaking from one element to the other. It was

unusable. I had to sit down and re-photograph these film loops on a screen with a video camera.

While I was doing this at some point I started to play more with the technique I used in the

performance: Painting even more on the film, bleaching some of these loops even more, and


then burning them. That’s the important part, which cannot be captured by an optical

printer. At first it was more for archival purposes, and then it became this other project.

BK: I like how the horizontal panning shots are disrupted by the vertical jumpiness that’s

caused by the projector. It creates a similar effect to the one in Brakhage’s film Sirius

Remembered (1959). In it, he superimposes really fast horizontal and vertical plans,

resulting in a type of polyrhythm. The conflicting movements in Western Sunburn reminded

me of that. It’s visually compelling.

KL: At that point I had been drawing for a quite awhile, especially pen-and-ink. When I was 17,

I took calligraphy courses. I was particularly interested in calligraphy techniques involving a

brush, without actually touching the table, where the hand would be over the paper. I was

trying different things, but I wasn’t really happy with the results I was getting. With [the

earlier film] Chaos (2002), for example, you see the things I was trying at that time, such as

straight lines of ink. There’s something only two-dimensional about it. Whatever I was

trying at that point was always about absences or presences of light, like shadows or spots

here and there. It had rhythm, but it was flat. There was something missing. So I kept going.

Meanwhile, I received some new music from a friend. I was listening to it one

night and I was really into it. I had a good feeling from it as I was brushing the filmstrip.

What’s interesting about that is, if you film a person doing a physical movement, this move-

ment creates a rhythm with the space and the light. But the movement you apply to a filmstrip

with ink and brush is imprinted on the film on a microscopic scale. This tiny little frame that

you blow up is actually like an extension of that very movement you were doing with the

brush. It was fascinating when I first looked at the filmstrips I did with the brush like that

on a Steenbeck. I remember staring at these images for almost three hours–and there was only

20 seconds of them! [Laughs.] The way I was working with the brush–at first I was doing

tiny, tiny textures using continuous movements. Before it was dry, I would do bigger

strokes at the end. So it would create this perspective in which you can feel that something

is way further than what’s in the foreground.

BK: So you were starting to work in a more gestural way on the filmstrip.


KL: Exactly, starting with those tiny textures, then doing bigger movements at the end to create

bigger strokes over it before it was dry. So the bigger strokes erase the smaller ones at the

end, but you can still see some of these tiny little textures underneath; some that are not

as big as those ones at the beginning, playing with that. I kind-of did this by accident; it

took me another two weeks to go back to what I did before to understand exactly how I did

it. I was trying over and over and I never got the same result until I actually figured out what

I had done. Then, those brush strokes kept going for ten months; the film was born from that.

BK: When you’re working with musicians, do you ever feel there’s a struggle between the

image and the sound? In Motion of Light, there are moments when the music seems to dictate

the rhythm. At the very least, it shapes our perception of the film’s visual rhythm.

KL: Yeah, it does, just as the image shapes our listening of the soundtrack. If we were to listen

to the music by itself, it would be a completely different experience. It adds something, but

it takes something away as well. Some people would probably prefer the film without the

sound. Some people think they go extremely well together. It’s a matter of perception.

In the case of Motion of Light, I wanted to create something with pure noise: abstract

imagery with abstract sound.

BK: One of your earlier films has a soundtrack by Lee Ranaldo. How did that happen?

KL: I was still in high school at the time. Sonic Youth was an important influence when I

was younger. I was listening to their music a lot, and at some point I got interested in their

more experimental projects, like Lee Ranaldo’s solo material. I got the chance to shoot my

first short film in Nevada, while I was in school there. They had a VHS camera that we

could use to make a short video piece. When I started to write and work on it, it was inspired

by one of Ranaldo’s songs. It was a spoken word piece called “The Bridge.” It’s funny,

because when I arrived down there I couldn’t speak English very well. I had trouble under-

standing what all the words meant. I was writing everything down to figure out what the

piece meant. I could understand most of it: that it was about him and his father going in this

old Chevy pick-up truck, delivering some furniture to his brother, or something like that.


I found one of these old trucks–it was a GMC, not a Chevy, though. But I found

this truck, and I was in the desert. The picture on the cover of the album was a photo by

Ranaldo’s partner, Leah Singer. It was a black-and-white photo of an old truck in the

Nevada desert, where I was basically. All these things came together at once.

It wasn’t until a couple of years after I had finished the film that I finally understood

why it was called “The Bridge.” What he’s actually talking about in the song is crossing the

Brooklyn Bridge. [Laughs.] I completely missed that part in my interpretation of the piece.

The nice thing about it, though, is that my teacher insisted I send Ranaldo a copy. I was a bit

shy doing this, so we wrote the letter together and we sent it to him. I didn’t expect him to

write back, but he actually did. He wrote me a letter, saying that he liked the film. I was

extremely pleased by his response: it was my first piece, so it meant a lot to me.

PART TWO: Double Negative (with Daichi Saito)

In part two of the interview, Double Negative co-founder Daïchi Saïto joins us to discuss the

origins, philosophy, and future direction of the Montreal-based filmmaking collective.

BK: Can you tell me about the origins of the Double Negative, where the name came from,

and how you arrived at the idea of starting a collective?

DS: We started in 2004. Basically, Karl and I sat down and talked about it. The actual forming

of the collective came later. At that time, we were sitting in a bar. We spent a lot of time

talking about it. At some point we decided to stop talking about it; let’s do it. First we

figured out who would be interested in doing this kind of thing with us, who we liked to

work with, most of them coming from Concordia [University]. Then we contacted them;

basically they were all interested. We explained the idea.

BK: It seems like a lot of the members came out of an experimental filmmaking class that

Richard Kerr taught.

DS: That’s right. Karl was there, though he wasn’t an official student, Eddie [Menz], Julien

[Idrac], Amber [Goodwyn], Chris [Payne]. Some other people, like Lucia [Fezzuoglio], I knew


from outside of the class. I didn’t know her very well, but I knew her through working together

in the Steenbeck editing rooms. I was working on my film, staying up all night, sleeping

at school. The only other person that was there was Lucia, so we exchanged conversation about

our work. One thing I was thinking about at the time: these film students, once they finish film

school, often get lost without access to equipment; they lose their peers. They can’t keep making

films like they want to, like they were doing in school. So the collective was also a way to

prevent that from happening, for myself, too.

The only option we have in Montreal, to gain access to equipment, is to join Main

Film [a filmmaking cooperative]. But the core of what we do is very personal. It’s a group

of artists getting together with a certain connection between them, working together. Main

Film doesn’t work that way. You pay a fee, you become a member, you get access to

equipment; but on a more personal, artistic level, there’s not much communication going on.

It’s an organization. That’s something we wanted to avoid. To make what we’re doing, in

a way, different from that model.

BK: What happens if someone wants to become a member of the collective?

DS: That’s something we have difficulty with. There’s no policy–we don’t have a policy for

anything. [Laughter.]

KL: We added two new members recently: Christopher Becks and Malena [Szlam]. They’re

two filmmakers making extremely interesting work, and who were interested in what we were

doing; they were just natural additions. There have been people in the past who wanted to

join the collective but it wasn’t obvious they were truly passionate about what they were

doing. We couldn’t see how they would bring anything to the group. These additions could

be endless: we could become 60 people, but it would be impossible to organize.

BK: Then you end up becoming a cooperative, by default.

DS: Yeah, exactly. That’s not what we want [to be exclusionary], but we have to operate that

way, by necessity. Because we have this [studio] space, everything’s here. All the equipment

is here, which we share. That’s one characteristic of they way we work: sharing equipment.


It’s hard to operate that way when people we don’t know very well are involved. Also, this

is part of my apartment. There’s no bathroom in the studio, so everyone has to use mine.

Each member has a key to the studio space; that means access to my place as well. So it has

to be based on trust. I personally couldn’t deal with having 20 other people trying to use the

studio: every time I’d have to be here. I have to be responsible for the equipment. These are

very practical reasons for why it’s difficult to expand. We’re not trying to create a secret sect.

KL: I feel like we’re closer to a music collective, or some kind of band, rather than a co-op.

DS: One thing we talked a lot about, in terms of inspiration, was Montreal’s underground music

scene: Constellation [an independent music label], the Godspeed people, how they manage

to do their work without being dependent on a big industry. We wondered why that isn’t

possible in cinema, to do something in a very grassroots, very independent way? Also, we’re

in Montreal, in Mile End. We’re very close [spatially] to those people in music.

BK: That’s something we touched on earlier: this sense of a community between film and

music. It seems like that’s really started to develop over the last several years.

KL: Like organizing the performances of Guy Sherwin at Sala Rossa [a popular music venue].

It’s natural: it brings us the same audience that supports the music scene.

BK: It’s a way of building audience.

DS: It’s opening up to people outside: like people in music, or the visual arts.

BK: Did you look towards other collectives when you were starting out, like The Collective

for Living Cinema in New York? Did you research other models?

DS: I personally didn’t do that kind of research, but I would think a lot about how the American

experimental film scene developed, and the things that were happening there in the 60s and

70s. That was certainly an inspiration, that ethos. It’s not about how things were organized;

it’s about the spirit. Stories of Jonas Mekas sleeping under the Steenbeck because there’s


no room after inviting some people over to his place, to make films. That kind of communal

experience, very informal, but very serious at the same time, without being institutionalized–

that was our beginning.

KL: I didn’t do any research either, on organizations. But we talked many times about what

happened in New York, this explosion of people getting together and organizing things in

different ways.

At Concordia, when I was studying in Richard’s class, it was obvious to me that I

wasn’t there to get a diploma or a grade. I was there to sit with other filmmakers and share

ideas, share ways of thinking about film. Being able to show a piece of film I made, receiving

comments on it, seeing stuff from other people, getting inspired by it–it’s something we

would have missed a lot after leaving school and being on our own.

BK: Do you feel that the work you put into Double Negative seeps into your own artistic practice?

DS: [Pauses.] Yeah. [Pauses.] It’s hard to point out what, but it does in many ways. For

me personally, doing Double Negative is also a statement. It makes a statement, because it’s

directly related to how you make your work. It makes a foundation for your own personal

work and artistic commitment. I feel we are definitely making a statement by proposing this

way of doing work. I think that’s a very important part of doing the collective. It’s almost

an ethical question.

BK: You also bring in filmmakers–David Gatten, Bruce McClure, Nicky Hamlyn–which is

a way of exchanging ideas with people from outside of Montreal, and also a way of exposing

yourselves to work that’s going on in other places.

DS: You always have to work on your stuff, but at the same you have to keep the atmosphere,

and the involvement, alive. One thing about bringing in visiting artists and organizing events

and screenings, and exposing a lot of work to the public is to build up an environment for

people interested in experimental cinema.


KL: By bringing filmmakers from other countries or other cities, and having this work here–

we try to do it on a regular basis–it brings people together, creating a reference point for

people to meet and exchange ideas.

DS: It’s kind-of a freewheeling method of organizing events, because we don’t have any budget.

Everything is paid for out of our pockets. So everything is half by accident, half by luck,

this artist happens to be here, and so on. That’s the only way that we could do it; so there

are limitations.

BK: That just makes it all the more impressive. With the limited financial resources you still

find ways of making things happen, which is more in an American tradition of organizing

within the arts. In Canada, there’s more of a tendency to line up for grants and then wait

around.

DS: That’s the thing: the infrastructure is already there [in Canada]. We become so dependent

on that infrastructure; you cannot go outside of it.

BK: You become beholden to a mission statement, and then you’re required to only program

a certain kind of work to maintain your funding. You lose the integrity of what you had at

the start.

DS: That relates to the worry we have about expanding the collective. The bigger the group

becomes, the more difficult it is to maintain autonomy.

KL: We can’t see ourselves as having fulltime jobs doing office work, doing all that accounting.

Not that it’s never going to happen, but it would certainly be tricky to deal with.

DS: The way that we operate is not very efficient. Each member does what they can do in their

capacity, covering things that others can’t. There are things that I can’t do myself, or that Karl

cannot but that other members can. We compliment each other that way.

Still, it’s difficult to find a balance when there’s no structure. Who’s got more say;

who’s doing more work than the others: these things can become very complicated. It has


become an issue [in the past]. But we talk a lot, and we get together. It’s really based on

trust; that, to me, is very important.

For example, the studio space: not everyone uses it all of the time. But it’s at least

a commitment that each member has, to keep the space. That means we each pay rent, which

isn’t easy for many people. Someone might think: I’m not using this space at all, why do I

have to pay rent? If people start saying that, groups like this can’t function. So that’s a

basic, bottom-line agreement, and it’s been really good.

BK: How do you feel about the recognition you’ve received?

KL: The true recognition is when someone, after a screening, tells you that they’ve been totally

blown away. You can feel when people are really enjoying what’s going on, and experiencing

something special and unique, something they haven’t seen before. That’s the best thing we

can get.

DS: I think because of the way we started and what we do, it took quite awhile to gain, if not

recognition, but a certain credibility. We are not an organization funded by arts councils,

dealing with this obscure corner of cinema. But by doing events and organizing screenings

[on a consistent basis], I feel that has changed.

Certainly, we did feel that it was time for something like this. It was a time when

nothing was really happening; we could feel a stagnant air in the film community.

KL: Cinéma Parallèle [a non-profit organization dedicated to Canadian and Quebec independ-

ent cinema, currently housed at the Ex-Centris screening complex in Montreal] used to screen

lots of these experimental films, and it some point they stopped. But now they’ve offered

us the possibility of programming experimental films every season. It’s nice: we don’t have

to get anything approved. We bring a program, and they show it. They’ve been trusting us

with this arrangement for almost two years now.

BK: Do you have an idea of where Double Negative is heading? Future plans?


DS: Well, we have this machine [35mm optical printer] that we have to fix. We wish that we

could set up a machine for processing film: a primordial artists’ lab. In terms of models, many

groups in Europe are moving in this direction, like [the artist-run film labs] L’Abomidable

and L’Etna in Paris, and no.w.here in London. I think what they’re doing is really interesting.

We’re not equipped like they are, though.

KL: We process our film in Daïchi’s bathtub. I mean, it’s OK for now– [Laughter.]

DS: Yeah, it’s OK for now. It’s fine. But some people come late at night, and stuff like that.

BK: Where does your equipment come from?

DS: The Oxberry 35mm printer comes from New York City, from a film lab that went bankrupt.

There’s a long story about this. It was supposed to be a giveaway deal, but when we got there

we had to pay for it. And, the person didn’t want to give us any parts: lenses, gates, sprockets–

all the most important parts. He just wanted to give us the optical bench. It was crazy. Every-

thing was done over the phone, so there was no contract. He told me he was going to trash it

the next morning, that he had already hired movers to do the job. So I had to decide on the

spot. I told him not to [trash] it, that we’d be there tomorrow morning. We had to rent a truck,

find a driver, and get six people down to New York City. Everything had to be done so quickly

that it was kind of a gamble. But we managed to get everything–almost everything. Unless

we did stuff like that, we wouldn’t have equipment like this.

We have a small JK [optical printer] that belongs to Lindsay [McIntyre], another

member of the collective. We have a Steenbeck and many other small pieces of equipment

that belong to Karl. We have a light table from Matt [Law]; Chris Payne’s projectors: a lot

of sharing, and some donations. We have the photo enlarger that you gave us, and one of

your projectors. John Price in Toronto gave us some stuff. Concordia [University] has been

really helpful as well.

KL: Since we don’t receive support from institutions and grants, we rely on the good will of

people.


DS: That’s really exciting. Also we get a lot of support from really experienced people–technicians

and people like that–who think that film is dying and that their expertise is going to waste.

They’re surprised that young people like us are so interested in film and trying to do something

out of it. They seem to like that, and they help us. That’s very, very important in film, in

experimental cinema, that passing on of knowledge. So this death of film that we talk about,

it’s not really the medium that’s dying; it’s the people’s involvement and interest in the medium

that’s going down. But as long as there are people who are still trying to keep that knowledge

alive, and do something creative out of it, it will survive.

KL: To go back to the beginning of the collective, there’s a detail that we didn’t talk about. Daïchi

was cleaning [his film] Chasmic Dance (2004) at my place; he was just finishing it. I remember

he hadn’t slept for two days; he was extremely tired. It was the first time I heard him say that he

didn’t want to hear about film for the next couple of hours. It was like “film film film” for such

a long time. That’s when I said to him, “Well, what if we go for a beer to talk about this

collective idea we had?” It was almost a joke. He looked at me and said, “Sure!” [Laughter.]

That was the first time we seriously talked about it. The beauty of this is: exactly two months

after this meeting on May 11th [2004], we had our first group screening, on July 10th, at the

National Film Board [of Canada] Theatre [in Montreal]. To see how people responded to

it, and to see how enthusiastic they were about the work–it was a beautiful positive energy

that just burst out of this. Our two-month anniversary, and we were celebrating our first

screening. It was packed; we had to refuse people at the door.

BK: Often the best ideas come out of sleep deprivation. And the name, “Double Negative?”

DS: Oh, the name: that’s something I came up with. That’s a name that I wanted to originally

use for a production company, before this collective idea. But it was perfect for the collective.

Everyone else had ideas, some of them were pretty interesting, some weird ones, but we settled

for Double Negative. I think it’s a good name; it has different connotations. People can interpret

it differently. What we’re doing is against the current, in a way, in the context of film becoming

almost obsolete. In a way it can be seen as going backwards, into the negative. But we’re

doing something positive, too. There’s also the allusion to film stock. It’s the same in French,

too: “Double Négatif.” That works well in this environment.


there's more to filmmaking syracuse experimental

Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official

cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free

films. If only our younger film makers–I have no hopes for

the old generation–would really break loose, completely loose,

out of themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way

to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a

complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.

>> Jonas Mekas

Syracuse Experimental Film & Media Workshop is a newly formed cooperative of artists,

programmers, and educators working to promote and encourage the creation (through

experimentation) of film and media as an art form.

Rather than defining “Experimental Film & Media” as a particular genre, a catalog of

styles, a linear historical trajectory, or a succession of avant-garde master works, we station

“experimental” at the fluid intersection of formal innovation/creation (new vision) and social/

political engagement (responding to the world), which are shaped and clarified through the

development of personal voice (authenticity). We advocate film and video production as an

instrument of individual expression, a spirit of approach that embraces improvisation and

chance over carefully drawn or pre-set plans, “difference over uniformity, flows over unities,

mobile arrangements over systems” (Michel Foucault).


than making films

The primary objectives of the Workshop are to present Central New York’s filmmaking

community with various approaches to alternative media production, to activate, amplify

and support members’ creative capacities, and to stir passion for time-based media that

transcends mainstream conventions and status quos.

These objectives will be achieved through a variety of activities, including monthly film

salons, production workshops, a visiting filmmaker series, screenings, lectures, and the

publication of a film and video journal.

The Workshop recognizes that generosity, free exchange of ideas, sharing of resources and

knowledge, and camaraderie are keys to the sustainability and growth of the larger under-

ground film and video community. Therefore, each member is expected to contribute

significantly to the overall esprit de corps, through technical instruction, assisting on

colleagues’ productions, and organizing screenings and exhibitions.


thus spake zarathustraregina muff

When Zarathustra was thirty years old she left her home and went into the mountains. For

ten years she enjoyed her spirit and solitude making film and video. But at last she went

before the sun at daybreak and spake:

“Great star, I am weary of my wisdom. Like the bee that hath gathered too much

honey, I need hands outstretched to take it, eyes to behold my creations.”

Zarathustra went down the mountain alone and when she entered the forest there

appeared an old workman with camera scouting for dancing light. Thus spake the workman

to Zarathustra:

“No stranger to me is this wanderer. She passed this way many years ago carrying

her ashes. Now altered is this Zarathustra, no loathing lurketh about her mouth. Wilt thou

now carry thy fire into the valleys?”

“And what doeth the workman in the forest?” asked Zarathustra.

“I make magic with light and create tactile experiences for the eyes. Creator am I,

creator of freedom who says to every ‘Thou shalt’ a cinematic Nay.”

Coils of film did roll about him and spring from his pockets and hair. From his

satchel he withdrew a small bird carved of wood which suddenly sang:

“I embody the ritual meanings of the practices of which I have been a part. What

meanings I have gained and lost on my way this saint hath captured for posterity on film.”

“Do not go down to men,” the saint said, “but stay in the forest. With singing and

weeping do I project my films for the bears and trees.”

When Zarathustra heard these words she bowed to the saint and said: “What have

I to offer thee with my films and videos?” And she went on her way.


But once she had gone a ways through the forest she said to her heart: “Could it be possible?

This saint has not heard that the work of art reproduced has become a work of art designed

for reproduction!”

Then Zarathustra arrived at the outskirts of a town. She found there many people

assembled in a field to see a film projected on the side of a barn. And thus spake she to the

people:

“I teach you the Seductress. Film is something to be surpassed. What have you

done to surpass film? A dangerous crossing is this medium, a trembling and halting.

“I love her whose soul is deep even in the wounding, her who may succumb to

a small matter.

“I love her whose soul is so overfull that she forgetteth herself when she holds a

camera in her trembling hands.”

After Zarathustra said these words she looked at the people and was silent. “Must

one batter their pride that they may learn to see with their bodies? They dislike to hear of

contempt for them. I will therefore speak of the contemptible, the last filmmaker.”

And thus spake Zarathustra:

“It is time for film to create a new future. It is time for film to turn toward the past.

Film hath been endowed with a Messianic power to which the past has a claim. ‘We have

discovered visual happiness,’ say the last filmmakers. ‘What do we care for the past?’ The

filmmakers make only optical images, lines of perspective.

“But I say to you: A storm called progress propels them forward, and the debris

of cultural barbarism grows skyward.

“Behold the Seductress. Tell me who I am, I who believeth neither in truth nor

falsehood, reason nor subterfuge.

“Pure appearance with nothing to signify, I challenge to a duel of vulnerabilities

absent depth and meaning.

“I avert my gaze from its course toward knowledge.

“I bring you an erotic image, a haptic visuality, a confusion of subject and object

fundamentally disordered, an image eluding all visual possession.”

Then an active viewer amongst the crowd shouted, “I refuse to be seduced by these

illusions, O Zarathustra! They are products of alienated labor. Give us facts by which we

might know what to do in the name of justice!”


The people became restless, until another cried out, “Give us this last filmmaker, O lonely one!

Make of each of us such a filmmaker. Then we will make you a present of this Seductress.”

The people laughed.

Zarathustra turned sad and said to her heart: “They understand me not. Too long

have I lived in the mountains, too long have I created for the brooks and cliffs.”

Then Zarathustra looked closely and saw the chains on the people. Chained by their

necks and thighs, their heads and genitals faced forward, toward the side of the barn. Thus

prevented from turning to see the source of light and from moving about the field that was

now a cave and a womb, their eyes fixed forward. They squabbled amongst themselves

about sex.

Suddenly a young woman appeared from a little door at the corner of the barn and

walked to the center of the wall. A spotlight shone on her. She was only half-clad and dressed

in much finery on her head and hips, and she performed for the people an alluring dance. But

they shouted obsenities and threw stones.

Then spake Zarathustra unto the people:

“Once hadst thou passions and calledst them evil. But soon willst thou have only

virtues; they will grow out of thy passions.

“Once hadst thou wild dogs in thy cellar: but they will change at last into birds and

charming songstresses.”

The people became further disordered when the dancer’s skirt was rent and revealed

her speculum. The stones struck her until she lay prostrate by the wall. Then Zarathustra went

and kneeled by her where her body fell. At length consciousness returned to the dancer

and she looked up at Zarathustra.

Then didst Zarathustra say to the disfigured one:

“People call the sovereignty of seduction feminine by convention, the same con-

vention that claims sexuality to be masculine. Verily I say, the feminine denies all things

their truth and foils all systems of power and meaning.

“People oppose the sovereignty of seduction to the masculine. But verily I say,

the strength of the feminine belongs to a universe distinct from interpretation, the unconscious,

and the masculine/feminine dichotomy. Play, duel, and reversible appearance belong to the

feminine, which is always evil before the law of desire.”


The dying dancer replied with suspicion, “I am not much more than a video artist which

hath been taught to dance by blows and for scanty fare.”

“Not at all,” answered Zarathustra. “Thou hast made danger thy calling; therein

there is nothing contemptible.”

When Zarathustra had said this the dying one moved to hand a DVD to Zarathustra

in gratitude. Then the people dispersed, it became night, and a cold wind blew. After several

hours the dancer spoke again for the last time: “Flee, sister, into thy solitude. Away from

the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great. Resemble again the tree which

thou lovest, the broad-branched one–silently and attentively it o’erhangeth the sea. Around

the devisers of new values revolveth the world, but around the actors revolve the people.

Flee, sister, into thy solitude.”

Zarathustra sat alone in the field beside the corpse, holding the DVD. Then she

said to her heart:

“Cinema was once the height of artifice. In it the sight of reality was an orchid

in the land of technology.

“Cinema once burst the prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a

second. In it merged art and science.

“But today we recreate the world in our bodies, and it is the memory of the

senses that shatters the world. One no longer recognizes the body’s mimetic traces in the

signs of technology. Yea, film is something to be surpassed.

“Cinema will soon embody seduction’s ruses and strategies, but in the play of time-

images that mime the bodies’ experiences. It will allude to the inaccessible secrets that

withdraw behind all discourse. It will embody the knowledge of sense memories formed

from childhood.

“Nor will cinema forsake the irony that prevents emotional demonstrations from

short-circuiting untried possibilities, but preserve the disillusion which leaves the field of

aesthetics open.”

When Zarathustra had said this to herself, she put the corpse upon her shoulders

and set on her way. But before she had gone a hundred paces there stole a man up to her in the

dark and whispered in her ear: “Leave this town, O Zarathustra. There are too many here

who hate thee. Repression of women’s speech will never again be lifted here unless it be by


converting her to a discourse that inscribes her pleasure as the hollow and negative of its

own phallic assertions.”

But Zarathustra answered:

“Lo! It is through cinema that woman will reopen paths into the logos that connote

her as castrated. Given that ‘reasonable’ films are powerless to translate all that pulses and

clamors in her cryptic passages, and that she has been misinterpreted, forgotten, frozen in

show-cases, rolled up in metaphors, buried beneath carefully stylized figures, made the

object of investigation, woman will henceforth insist on the blanks in cinematic discourse

which recall the places of her exclusion and which ensure the cohesion, the articulation, the

expansion of established forms.”

Then Zarathustra continued on her way into the forest to bury the body.

Scammed Sources

Baudrillard, Jean Seduction (St. Martin’s, 1990) p. 7 sovereignty, p. 116 irony

Benjamin, Walter Illuminations (Schocken Books, 2007) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” p. 233 orchid, p. 236 prison-world “Theses on the Philosophy of History” p. 254 Messianic, p. 256 barbarism, p. 258 debris

Irigaray, Luce Speculum of the Other Woman (Cornell, 1985) p. 140 hollow, blanks, 142 “reasonable,” 144 show-cases

Marks, Laura, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke, 2000) ch. 2 transnational object, ch. 3 haptic visuality, p. 214 mimetic traces

Nietzsche, Friedrich Thus Spake Zarathustra (Modern Library’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche, n.d.) “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” various passages Sect. V passions, dogs, Sect. XII market-place


Brooklyn Babylon Cinema Screening Flyer Courtesy of Scott Berry.


mission statement / dumba

Dumba is a collectively-run, not-for-profit space for art, performance, meetings and gatherings.

We strive to explore differences of gender, sexuality, culture, and heritage and to encourage

freedom, mutual aid, and pleasure. Dumba is an all ages venue committed to building

community by opening access to art and information.

manifesta


Brooklyn Babylon Cinema Screening Flyer Courtesy of Scott Berry.


brooklyn babylon cinemascott berry

Brooklyn Babylon Cinema ran monthly for over two years at Dumba, a queer collective art

space near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The BBC (yes, it was an accident!) was run without a

budget. We paid guests off at the door in true do-it-yourself (DIY) fashion. We really wanted

to fill voids that other cinemas AND micro-cinemas were missing: queer, young, political,

short. For example, The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema on the Lower East Side of Manhattan

has presented a weekly screening in a storefront performance space for [over] five years now.

Although it has shown an incredible number of innovative and resolutely independent makers

over the years, it has largely seemed hesitant to program queer work.

After successfully–and barely–pulling off a 12-hour queer film screening at Dumba with a lot

of help, we soon decided we wanted a more regular venue for the films we liked and to bring

in guests to screen and curate; and we weren’t afraid to show any formats. Like most small

collectives we were always scraping by and doing numerous projects at once, so publicity would

sometimes be last minute. We always provided food and beverages for a donation, and always

encouraged folks to stick around and chat, which would sometimes lead to re-screening films

late into the night. We were influenced by the London Exploding Cinema collective, who have

_____

This text was first published as part of a longer article in Millennium Film Journal 41 (Fall 2003). See Scott Berry “Size Matters: Microcinemas and Alternative Exhibition Spaces,” http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ41/berrypage.html


been running a DIY microcinema for over ten years, with “no stars no funding no taste” as

their rally cry. Central to their manifesto is that articulate, vibrant, political cinema exists

WHOLLY outside the mainstream film production environment and should continue to do

so. But as in most cities, there is a dearth of venues showing low budget, small gauge,

independent, radical, underground film so they started one themselves and have spawned

countless similar ventures. Their site is worth a visit and includes plenty of information

about how to start your own micro-cinema.1

Notes

1. For more on London’s Exploding Cinema, go to http://www.explodingcinema.org/


the good/bad art collective georgette nicolaides

When you think of conceptual art, the last place that may come to mind is a Texas college

town. However, from 1994 to 2001, a band of surrealist pranksters known as the Good/Bad

Art Collective, headquartered two hours north of Dallas/Fort Worth, staged one-day happen-

ings that involved complex installations combining multiple mediums. While the University

of North Texas (UNT) is better known for its music program–contemporary composers such

as John Cage have taught there–a UNT art course called “Hybrid Forms” laid the theoretical

groundwork for integrating a diverse spectra of forms with a political sensibility that shocked

viewers into thinking. The Village Voice described Good/Bad as “Fluxus with ADD.”1 Even

the collective’s name provokes thought; typically, art patrons categorize their experiences or

the objects of their view as either “good” or “bad.” The name forces viewers to reconsider

that dichotomy.

A rotating cast of UNT art students comprised the collective, with some departing

after their graduation. A core group of artists provided continuity throughout the collective’s

tenure, although there was little actual leadership. Over 250 events were collectively planned,

extensively publicized, executed, and dismantled the following day. All of the projects “re-

volve[d] around some perverse theme.”2 Examples include:

of denton, texas

Although some works remain viable for long periods of time, most art passes away.

Immortality is reserved for the exceptional few. Origins and conclusions meet when

inspiration is also the cause of an artwork's death.

>> Linda Weintraub, In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art


• Nothing is Happening – A 1996 non-event for which press releases were sent out. The

(non) event consisted of a collective member taped face first to a telephone poll. A turquoise

flyer attached to his back read “Nothing is Happening.”3

• Frat Boys – A 1997 event that enclosed four fraternity members “in a tiny observation

room containing no more than a full keg of beer, a microphone, and some colored markers.

In front of an amused audience, madness ensued: bad graffiti, abject drunkenness, jeers at

their viewers–followed by a raucous breakout four hours later.”4

• Very Fake, But Real – A 1997 happening held in Houston, Texas, in which Good/Bad

members created an exact replica of their Denton studio, and then built a roller rink around it.

During the event, participants skated around the studio, with some engaging in a game of

roller derby.5

• Joey on I.C.U. – A 1999 show about the life of a lonely kangaroo and his jackalope friend

Maple, featuring animated sculptures.6 During the exhibition, Maple pulls a stagecoach that

Joey rides on to find his mother, before being attacked by Rondo Indians. Joey thus winds

up in the I.C.U.

Joey on I.C.U. was staged at ABC No Rio, a collective space on New York’s Lower East Side.

By 1999, several members of the Denton group had graduated with the realization that

conceptual art wasn’t exactly a booming Texas industry; subsequently, some relocated east

to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Joey project marked the collective’s coming out on the New

York art scene, with over three hundred people attending the one-night installation. At that

point there were two loosely connected Good/Bad Collectives, but by 2001 both had dissolved.

The challenges of programming two locations in different stages of growth, coupled with

the unique difficulties of each market, in particular for conceptual and event-based work,

led to the group's demise. Financial constraints may have also contributed.

In regards to funding, one of the techniques the collective effectively used to raise

money was a “Rock Lottery.” As recently as July 2007, former Good/Bad member Chris

Weber employed this fundraiser to support Seattle’s Vera House, a shelter for battered women.7


This is how a Rock Lottery works: A group of musicians assemble early in the morning. A

random lottery assigns each one to a different band. Each ensemble gets a drummer, but the

rest of the instruments are left to chance. The bands have the rest of the day to create and

rehearse music for that evening's performance. Sometimes the performances are amazing;

other times the band is assigned three vocalists and no bass player, and/or drinks all day, then

performs to catcalls. But it's all-good. Or bad. Good/bad.

Notes

1. Christina Rees, “Good/Bad’s multiband Brooklyn event,” The Village Voice (August 29, 2001), http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0135,regulars,27655,16.html

2. Christina Rees, “Manhattan Transfer,” Dallas Observer (July 29, 1999), http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-07-29/news/manhattan-transfer/

3. “Fry Street Photo Archives: Good/Bad’s Nothing,” CentralDentonPreservation.org (October 25, 2006), http://www.centraldentonpreservation.org/blog/2006/10/

4. Christina Rees, “Manhattan Transfer.”

5. ”Good/Bad Art Collective,” Everything2 (September 27, 2000), http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=765031

6. Christina Rees, “Manhattan Transfer.”

7. Sam Machkovech “Winning Numbers: It’s Good to Play the Rock Lottery,” The Stranger (July 11, 2007), http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=262597


masochism of the margins:steve polta

The legendary West Coast filmmaker Craig Baldwin is a whirlwind force of infectious creative

energy. His extreme take on the found footage film genre confounds narrative, documentary,

and avant-garde boundaries, proposing entirely new formulae for the intersections of form

and content, audience reception, and media critique. His long running curatorial project–

Other Cinema, running weekly in San Francisco, thirty-six weeks a year–draws on a similar

collage aesthetic. For over twenty years, Other Cinema programs have delivered to Bay

Area audiences insane amalgams of underground cinema, genre film, media and community

activism, performance and sound art, and unique and astounding lost-and-found orphan

works from Baldwin’s infamous film/video archive as well as hosting a dizzying array of

artists, curators, community activists, conspiracy freaks, and other indescribable and

wonderful wackos.

Arguably as significant a cultural contribution as his film work, the history of Other

Cinema has been largely undocumented. The interview appearing here is excerpted from

an unpublished oral history that traces the origins of Baldwin’s curatorial work and the

relationship between his film work and this area of activity. It is part of San Francisco

Cinematheque’s ongoing project to collect and preserve first-person accounts of Bay Area

media arts history, spearheaded by Steve Polta. A student of Baldwin’s in 1995, Polta has

been a participant in the Other Cinema project continuously since January 1996 and has

contributed to the production of Baldwin’s Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) and Mock Up

on Mu (2008).

an interview with craig baldwin


Craig Baldwin North to South: Still from Mock Up on Mu (2008), courtesy of the artist. Baldwin in his studio in San Francisco (Photo credit: Steve Polta).


The original interview was conducted on September 30, 2007 at Artists’ Television

Access (ATA) in San Francisco.1

SP: Let’s talk about your time in Davis, California. What were you doing there? Were you

in school?

CB: Around 1970-72, I had somehow been turned on to collecting, which eventually led to

the “Industrial Amok” series.2 I left Davis in ‘72 or ‘73–

SP: Did you graduate from UC Davis?

CB: I didn’t. I graduated from San Francisco State University. I left school more than once,

to travel around the world. I actually went to South America at that time. The point is,

before I left Davis, I had already kind of moved into film. They didn’t have a film department

per se, but they had a film class, taught by Mike Henderson.

At the time, I was making Super 8 films. But I was also interested in the idea of

working with found stuff. Back then, if you bought films X, Y, and Z from Blackhawk, they

would throw in a sampler of their other stuff just to get you interested in buying more. This

was before video. I bought the sampler, nice clips from this and that, and I didn’t have to watch

the whole films. Just great clips from comedies, documentaries, early cinema. I folded all of

that in and made a movie out of it. In fact I did a performance with it.

SP: What was it?

CB: I can’t remember the name of the performance. But I was running around, casting my

shadows and there was film projected on me and I did some action.

SP: And this was at Davis?

CB: Yeah. It sure was. I was also in the theatre department. At the time some of the film

classes were in the theatre department, and some were in the English department. It didn’t


make any difference to me but I was mostly in the theatre department, because I was in plays

and studying about theatre, which I always had an interest in. I wasn’t really interested in

film until I got a Super 8 camera. This isn’t related to programming, but my production over-

lapped with my programming once I got into archival stuff.

SP: You talk about the drive to collect. Where did that interest come from?

CB: I don’t know how I got turned on to it. I saw a catalog somewhere. The films are rare now

but they weren’t then. I used to have boxes and boxes and boxes of them. Now I probably have

one box of them. But I used to just pour through that stuff. I literally just poured through it.

SP: You said you were making Super 8 films around that time. What sort of films were you

making?

CB: Well, there was one film where I folded in the Blackhawk sampler. Early on it occurred

to me that that was something I could do.

SP: Had you seen films that did that?

CB: I can’t say I remember seeing a found footage film at that time. When I was in high

school I used to go to midnight movies where I saw some early underground films. That

made a tremendous impression on me.

SP: Where was this?

CB: It was called the Towne Theatre. It was right next to American River College.

SP: This was in Sacramento?

CB: Yes. Carmichael, my suburb. The theatre was probably for the benefit of the junior college

students, not that it was a real active student ghetto or anything like that. But it was way

in the suburbs and not downtown.


SP: What sort of programs were you seeing?

CB: Insanely brilliant straight up American underground of the ‘60s. George Kuchar, Robert

Nelson, Christopher Maclaine–

SP: So that made a big impression on you.

CB: Oh, it totally blew my mind. Just absolutely changed my life. That was my idea of fun.

Most people in high school didn’t go to midnight movies; it was too beatnik. It wasn’t exactly

a football game. It was like poetry, people wearing turtlenecks and all that kind of stuff. I

was totally into that.

SP: You were totally into what?

CB: Beatnik-ism! You know, I was like Maynard Krebs. [Maynard G. Krebs was a “beatnik”

character, played by Bob Denver, on the television program The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,

which aired 1959-1963.] I was totally into the whole image of a Beatnik. I dug it. Anyway,

I can’t say for sure if I saw a found footage film at that time. I might have. You could see

them anywhere. You could watch TV commercials by the ‘60s.

SP: I’m still curious where it came together for you.

CB: I can’t say; it wasn’t like a thunder strike moment. A lot of conditions lined up. An

explosion of underground film in the ‘60s–that was coming of age here. There was also a

downtown cinema in Sacramento called the Marvel Arts Cinema. Keep in mind, I was middle

class. I had a Super 8 camera. I ended up going to the University of California.

SP: That was at Davis?

CB: Yeah. Davis and Santa Barbara, too.

SP: So you went to Davis and then you went to Santa Barbara.


CB: Yeah. When I went to Santa Barbara, same thing, the first fuckin’ fall. I lived in the dorms.

Well, what do you do at night? You get out of your dorm room. You certainly don’t waste any

time doing homework. I’d go to the movies on campus. Half the time it would be free for the

students.

SP: And what did you see then?

CB: I will never forget the first movie. It was by Peter Watkins, the one where the Nuclear war

is about to happen. I just sat through the whole thing without moving. I went to the early show,

then I just sat and waited for the next show to start and saw it again. I was so bowled over.

The War Game! [1965] by Peter Watkins. It was probably his most famous film. The other

one was about the student strike at San Francisco State. It’s also a very famous film. It’s always

talked about with the early ‘60s radical newsreel stuff. Those are just two titles off the top of

my head. In other words, it wasn’t the Bergmans and the Pasolinis. For me it was just going

down to some hall. It was, like, below theatrical level, you know, just a 16mm projector.

SP: What else were you involved with back then? You weren’t just passively watching movies

and geeking out on them.

CB: No. I was into political activism. I was always politically active. Now I’ve become more

interested in point-of-view, personal idiosyncrasies, obsessions, auteur style.

SP: So you think you’re more interested in that now than you were back then?

CB: Oh yeah, sure. It was all about content then. Not that I have a simple definition that would

define, distinguish, and divide content from the other issues. What I’m saying is, we were

interested in looking at any film on South Africa. Now it’s more about nuance, depth, and

subtleties among shorter films.

SP: Is that how you think about your programming now?

CB: One of the ways I think about it.


SP: Tell me more about the difference between then and now.

CB: The idea then was that everyone was pissed off about South Africa. So we created events

where we could focus and maybe learn something. Everybody would eat it up, you know, like

a forty or fifty minute film, with big color images. That would be the show. It was about

finding a way forward and raising consciousness, getting excited and satisfying our curiosity.

Now it has to do more with teasing people through and opening up spaces. More

finesse, more nuance and breaking it down, not a huge chunky thing. I wouldn’t be drawn

towards something like that anymore. I would just leave that to television now.

SP: So has the landscape changed? Did you feel then that nobody else was showing films

like that?

CB: There was a place called Le Peña in the East Bay; they would show films like that. They

were a big influence on me. I only went there a couple times, but I thought their programming

was great. But that’s all they really do: political. I wanted to do peoples’ culture: joyous

Yippie stuff, revolutionary but with a sense of humor.

Karl Cohen was another huge influence on me. I still rent from him all the time.

Karl had a great series at the Intersection [Intersection for the Arts]. He would show a mix

of cartoons–he was always into cartoons and Academy Award winners. That wasn’t my thing,

but he’d have an art film in there, like Simon of the Desert [Luis Buñuel, 1965]. I just loved

that! He might show Simon of the Desert with a half hour of musical trailers–Nicholas Brothers

doing tap dances and weird trailers and cigarette commercials, and a short here and there,

and cult animations: more variety and circus-like. The way Karl was programming really

made a deep impression on me.

I got a lot of my films from Karl: short things and little novelty items. He had an

Alice Cooper film, which, you know, I’d go nuts for. Or he’d have a film of a magician

performing or something. He has a catalog, which is not bad at all. He had [Jean] Genet’s

The Balcony [directed by Joseph Strick, 1963]—which is a great film. I used to love that

film and no ever talks about it.

The [San Francisco] Cinematheque never seemed to work with Karl that much,

probably because his prints were pretty fucked up. But like the Em Gee films,3 I couldn’t get


enough of them. I just thought, this is totally cool! This is made for microcinemas, because

they’re kind of a micro-distributor.

A lot of the political films I probably got from Newsreel [Newsreel is a film

distributor]. They had a South African section, and there was an El Salvador film and video

place, believe it or not, right next door. Right here [i.e. on Valencia Street in San Francisco,

near the interview location].

SP: What did they do?

CB: There was an arm for the El Salvador solidarity movement in Northern California. There

was probably one in every big city, L.A. too. There’d be a propaganda arm–education and

outreach–to organize and send money down there. There are millions of Salvadorans in the

Bay Area. I don‘t know where the prints were made but they distributed them. And I actually

worked with them a little bit, helped them clean up their splices and stuff. We did a big show

once at the Victoria Theater, a benefit for people of El Salvador, revolutionaries–

SP: And what was your role in that show?

CB: I programmed it. It was a big show, with people sitting in fuckin’ straight up theater

seats, big screen, 16mm projection. There were probably two or three movies on that

program, maybe four, with leader between them. I had to get the prints and put ‘em on the

reel and blah blah blah.

SP: Were you living and working here at Artists’ Television Access4 around this time?

CB: I probably was, because I moved here in ‘86.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing Jeffrey Skoller and I would do around that

time. We’d show Johnny Guitar [Nicholas Ray, 1954] and another Western on 16mm. Three

shows in one night. It was part of the ARE [ARE was another San Francisco-based exhibition

venue] thing: “Psycho Western.”

SP: What year was this? You showed it three times?


CB: Insane. It was almost more of a rep house kind of thing. It wasn’t this fine art film

shorts thing we’re doing now.

SP: This seems more like an auteur program.

CB: Yeah, we did auteur. Jeffrey definitely has that auteur thing.

SP: What was your relationship with him then?

CB: Oh, just spiritual comrades. He was a good friend, roommate, and pal. A very dedicated

maker and student of cinema.

SP: When you put these ARE programs together with Jeffrey, did you have the idea that you’d

be doing this for a certain length of time?

CB: Well, no one could see beyond that. It’s a big hassle, once there are other things going on.

Who wants to waste a lot of time doing this, writing this out, spending their own money–

SP: But you’ve been doing it for ages.

CB: That’s ok: I have the masochism of the margins.

SP: What do you mean?

CB: Masochism of the margins means, you gotta take a lot of pain. If you were just [pause]

totally averse to pain you wouldn’t be in this part of the art world. But there’s a frisson with

the tension and the deprivation–there’s a certain kind of excitement that comes out of it, living

marginally, and if you totally went straight and just rented some hall and something from a

distributor and put it all together–what’s the point? It might be a good show but it wouldn’t

be exciting. You wouldn’t be taking any risk, or doing anything [pause] new. To do some-

thing that’s never been done–Other!–something new or alternative, then it becomes dangerous!

And you have to suffer because of it. That’s the masochism of the margins.


The term was first introduced to me by Steve Fagin. It’s not a new idea, but he nailed it right

there; I recognized it immediately. It’s not the same as being poor and marginalized. It’s a

choice. I’m totally middle class; my brothers are quite well off. I can’t say that I’ve always

been [pause] victimized.

SP: Where did that attitude come from? When you were a beatnik in high school?

CB: I don’t know what it was. I was the youngest child–maybe that had something to do

with it.

SP: I thought the oldest child was usually the weird one.

CB: No, the oldest takes after the father. The youngest one gets the crap beat of out of him.

But maybe the Viet Nam war made a bigger difference on me.

SP: Why? Tell me about that.

CB: It totally changed my life! A lot of the arty films that were really meaningful to me were

anti-war films. But I always merged it together. I never separated pop and subculture from

political activism. They were always married in my mind.

Why do I do this? That’s a bottomless question. I could list ninety-nine reasons:

Because I enjoy it personally, it’s a great social thing, I get aesthetic satisfaction out of it. It’s

meaningful, it’s political engaging, it’s a community thing. All these things sound cliché but

there’s no secret. It’s about taking a more active role. I don’t think this will be any surprise

to [future generations]. It’s about engaging with the present moment.

One of the best shows I put on in my entire life was at a place on 24th Street, near

Ocho Loco [a performance venue located on 24th Street in San Francisco, at Potrero]. It was

like a cabaret. People didn’t sit in a long rectangular room; they sat the other way–i.e. the short

throw–and there was a band right there: Five Year Plan. They were really good. They put the

drummer up front. I remember some old wave kind of guy, going “no no–shut the drummer

down, put him in the back,” but no no no, the idea was that it was a new wave kind of thing.

It was more percussive, like The Slits. It’s more like [chanting] “Hiya pika puko yayo!”


you know, more rambunctious and jazzy and filled with energy, so everyone was together when

they watched it. It wasn’t separated–we were watching the films and then we had the music.

SP: What year was this?

CB: That’s gotta be between ‘80 and ‘84 if you can dig it. ‘80, probably. Reagan. That

show was, for me personally, an answer to your question about satisfaction or return or reward.

That’s where I would have wanted to be at the time, even if I wasn’t programming it because

it was absolutely at the front edge. It was absolutely what was happening, taking the people,

the community–not just escapism, but having a good time–listening, dancing, drinking, picking

up chicks and all that kind of stuff. But everybody was also so conscious. It was all about

this engagement and smashing this asshole [Reagan], and it was good. It was, like, a little

bit of rage in there, a little bit of anger and justice, you know, vengeance. A little bit of doing

the right thing. Anyone can go see some stupid art film–that’s great and I don’t put that down

at all–but, to me, when there was a little more of a political sensibility, it seemed to have more

juice to it, more bite, more danger, more excitement, and that was way cooler.

SP: You mean more of a community thing?

CB: Yeah, sure. Like the La Peña kind of thing or the People’s Cultural Center, or even the

Valencia Tool and Die which I used to go to even before I started showing films. They would

sometimes have films at these punk shows–it was all kind of pre-video. People would be

marching around, there’d be films, and it was like, building an alternative.

SP: Tell me about the style and layout of your calendars.

CB: It’s whatever you want to call it: overdone, cramped, cluttered, whatever. A lot of small

little gestures, typed, clip art. It’s not quite as messy as it used to be.

I never finished the whole story about Karl [Cohen]. He had this film called The

Yippie Film, which is basically a collage of the Chicago National Convention [the 1968

Democratic National Convention], Abbie Hoffman and all those guys in there, and they

nominated a pig for president.


SP: Like an actual barnyard pig?

CB: Yeah. They would always carry him around. It was very cute, and it was a brilliant

stunt. The Yippie Film was a collage: it wasn’t only stuff from the political realm, from the

streets, documentary material, newsreel verité footage, etc. It also mixed in all these old

pie throwing things. It was just the kind of the thing I used to like, because it had humor

and was playful and was cut up and had good energy. Very early on, that kind of thing

exerted a certain influence on me: the idea that you could make a political film and it

could be a funny ironic surreal collage.

Around that time I was working at the Viz club, later called The Independent,

and also called the Dog Saloon.

SP: Kennel Club. It was called the Justice League when I used to work there.5 What were

you doing at the Viz?

CB: I ran visuals there, films. Light shows. One or two projectors. Nothing like the

Trocodero.6

SP: Where did you find the stuff that you showed?

CB: Early on I would collect material from lists. Not only the rental lists, but also the “to

buy” lists. You could buy a Super 8 film, like a Blackhawk, and own it, and I still do [own

the films], or you could buy these things which were second hands, or dupes, from other

collectors: a clip from a part of a movie, for example. Every case is different.

SP: And you were pretty obsessed with this kind of collecting?

CB: I liked that part of it, yeah.

[…]


Craig Baldwin Screening poster for Generic Genre, Midnight Movie Lounge, June 1984. Courtesy of Steve Polta and San Francisco Cinematheque..


Craig Baldwin Other Cinema calendar, March 3-May 26, 1990. Courtesy of Steve Polta and San Francisco Cinematheque.


SP: What was your relationship with Steve Anker [Artistic Director of the San Francisco

Cinematheque] then?

CB: He liked my fliers. Occasionally he paid me to do one.

SP: How much did he pay you?

CB: I don’t know. $20. Big deal. It was just more that he liked my style, that’s all.

SP: So where would a flier like this be? Were they on telephone poles around?

CB: Yeah. But I don’t put anything on telephone poles anymore. They’re torn down in such

a short period of time.

Do you remember the 20th anniversary of the Cinematheque? For some reason I

was called–maybe it was five or six years ago–asking, “Do you have any anecdotes?”

SP: Who called you? Anker? Kathy [Geritz, film programmer at Pacific Film Archive]?

CB: No, no. Somebody writing for the press, like Dennis Harvey or Johnny Ray Huston:

“We’re just trying to write this story. Do you have any anecdotes about Cinematheque?

Because we know you’re this film guy in town.”

SP: And what was the story?

CB: Basically, it about was the Material Action Films [Materialaktionsfilme, Otto Muehl,

1970] screening. I was the projectionist that night, working above the door. That’s where

the projector was. A lot of these little storefronts in the Mission have a door that recedes and

above it there’s a platform or a mezzanine: it’s like a shelf. There are no rooms. It’s open:

it’s where grocers store their shit.

SP: So were you working for Cinematheque? Was that a regular thing for you?


CB: I might have been on their late night show. Anyway, the upshot is–have you ever seen

Muehl’s Material Action Films? The last one, or the second to last, has a woman getting

penetrated by a duck–or is it a goose? Well, it’s hard to say what happened, but shortly after

that scene, all the power went out. And that was the end of the show, cuz no one knew where

the fuse box was. I’ve always thought that someone saw that scene and–I think the goose’s,

or the swan’s head gets cut off, and that that person was probably upset.

SP: That’s the end of the story?

CB: I have nothing to add. It’s a good anecdote, though. Everyone was plunged into total

darkness. It was packed! Packed! Take my word for it. It was really hot in there.

SP: Like how many people? 100?

CB: Yeah! Well, 100 would be a little high to fit in a storefront. It was comparable to the size

of the ATA theatre space. I’d say about 80.

SP: Do you think 100 people would come to see Otto Muehl now?

CB: Good question. I wouldn’t show Otto Muehl now. Not because I don’t like him. It just

seems like he’s already been covered. If people want to find out about Muehl they can probably

find his work on video somewhere. But Otto Muehl is still good. It wasn’t just a flavor of the

month thing. It seems to me that was more of a culture of underground cinema kind of thing.

SP: You mean back then?

CB: Yeah. More about something rare and obscure: “Oh yeah—the material actions films! I’ve

heard so much about that…” There was a mystique to it. All this stuff! People don’t seem to

care anymore. There’s so much access, so much information already out, so many things to do

with our time, and so much competition. How can you get excited? Like I say–I had to go see

these movies. When I was at Davis I saw five movies in one day. I would just have to go.

.


SP: Let’s get back to what was happening then.

CB: It’s slightly over my head to draw any super big generalizations. I’m just talking about

my impressions. And my impression is that there was more of an attraction back then. I

always end up watching films anyway. But the need to have to see something–I never even

go to a theatre now. It just seems like a preposterous old-fashioned idea to me.

SP: But you’ve got people coming out to see your shows every week.

CB: Don’t you see? That has so much more juice to it. There’s much more excitement and

energy involved: seeing somebody doing live performance or a lot of short things, having

an idea around it rather than just kicking back and watching a movie. It has to do with

being in the contemporary moment. Otto Muehl is great, but his work is from a certain

period. It seems more historical.

SP: But back then, it didn’t seem that way?

CB: Yeah–maybe not. It seemed more contemporary.

SP: Like it had more relevance?

CB: Yeah yeah yeah.

SP: How do you know what’s relevant now? Where do you get your ideas from? For instance,

how do you know when it’s time to show something retro now?

CB: If I gave you an answer it would sound like I have a system but that’s really not the case.

There are fourteen programs on each calendar, and there are conditions that are in motion.

There are things happening in the world, that appear in the newspaper, and there are things

that happen locally. For example, [monthly cyclist activist event] Critical Mass is a big thing

now; everybody knows that there’s energy around bikes, and other green issues. Then there

are things that are happening in the art world, and there are things that happen in the world of


ideas, like books being published. That has always been a big influence on me: new sorts of

arguments that come out of books. A lot of times I get show ideas from books—I can’t read

the books but I’d like to see a film show around the issues they raise.

SP: What’s an example?

CB: [Pauses.] Well, in a way I’m making a film [Mock Up on Mu] that kinda came out of

a book, Sex and Rockets [Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter].

That’s not exactly programming but when I finish the film it’ll get programmed. Or, Noam

Chomsky could come out with a new book, and maybe there’s a new documentary about

him. I don’t have time to read the Chomsky book, but he’s at the front lines. All eyes are

on him: he’s still got something to say. Or it may be a theory, whatever. Anything. Sexuality.

Systems science. Graffiti. Anything that has a certain place in the world of ideas. If you

look at the last two or three seasons of Other Cinema you’ll see there’s always a book launch

on the calendar. I like very much what Modern Times [a bookstore on Valencia Street in San

Francisco] does.

In other words, do like the writer. But if you go to a book talk, you end up listening

to someone read. How boring! But to do something like a book talk, where you don’t read–

maybe a couple pages, sure–but the point is to include a motion picture component. It can

be in slide show form, PowerPoint, spoken word, reading, and/or performance even.

Together these things add up to a whole evening, in which an idea can be considered several

different ways.

A perfect example would be the Sam Green show [December 8, 2007]. That’s

going to be a very exciting show. Take my word for it. But if you look at it on the calendar,

you’ll say, “I don’t even know what’s going on down there.” They’re just going to talk through

ideas. But I guarantee that show will sell out, because Sam’s an interesting maker. Or maybe

he isn’t, but people want to find out.

That’s where I want to take it now: towards ideas. It’s more about creating a

platform for ideas, which can be worked through in many different ways. If you go to some

cushy theatre and just sit there for two hours, that’s fine. But it doesn’t have the same

currency, the same dialog.


Another example is what Greta [Snider] did [November 11, 2006],7 with the 3-D. That was

a pretty sophisticated idea of programming. It’s a long ways from throwing an hour long

documentary on the screen, like news footage, a bunch of people raising their fists. That’s

great, but to actually present something with subjectivity, like with slides–it’s not even movies

now, just slides–while someone talks over them. Don’t you see how discursive that is? It’s

more of a dialog; it involves answering questions, and more direct responsibility, account-

ability, and presence. It has more of a “being there” quality.

It’s also a total microcinema idea. As opposed to a huge theatre, like The Castro

[Theatre, in San Francisco]–you can put 500 people in there–where everybody’s watching

Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, a great film, no argument, but I’m not interested in that.

It’s worthless as an experience. But to bring people together, to create a platform for the

sharing of ideas, that, to me, goes beyond cinema. That’s breaking though, you know?

That’s bringing it back to books. Except a book is not a public thing, unfortunately. You

can’t have a guy out there reading his book–it’s preposterous. But you can have a guy or girl

up there, and they can read a little bit and then talk and show. Slide shows are my favorite.

SP: Why? What’s so great about slide shows?

CB: Because of the language. Again, this is more my style and preference. The combination

of language and images–that’s what I like. There’s a million galleries around town that have

beautiful images and pictures in them, but it’s not my thing. My interests in so-called “art,”

are really not about decoration, or visual beauty, whatever that is. I’m very skeptical about

those terms.

But these activities, these environments we’ve created, get exciting when there

can be a challenging exchange of ideas. There may be contestation, criticism, dialectical

give and take. That, to me, is cutting edge. The most exciting thing is developing and

challenging ideas about new art. Film is so much more capable of that than painting, if you

ask me. But now you can create a show that’s as creatively challenging as making a movie,

because you’re still putting components together.

Take the show last night [September 29, 2007]–it was awesome, even though there

wasn’t a lot of language involved. I didn’t put that show together8 but it’s typical of a show


I could totally, unequivocally, get behind: different people working together, some of the

same genres, different instrumentation, everybody had their own style, different films but

they were also by [animator Ray] Harryhausen. There was a million different ways you

could look at it and everything was a new experience yet it totally held together.

For me it was great because there was this wildness yet there was also a circling

back to film history–Harryhausen, early children’s animation–and these stories, with all their

cultural richness. There was just layer after layer and depth depth depth depth depth. You saw

so much just in the films themselves, and with the music on top, you say, “Yeah! Now we’re

really kickin’ it!” It’s not just retrieval of old funky movies for archeological purposes–that

wouldn’t have held either. The movies are unwatchable on their own. They’re preposterously

mediocre. But the new stuff, with the music, that became something exciting.

Ultimately, that’s what I’m going for: not just creating a comfortable thing where

people can kick back with a tall cup of coffee and savor the moment. That’s not my idea.

It’s really about setting up a dynamic relationship between audience and musician, artist/

presenter, talker, explainer, interpreter, benshee, etc. The benshee is a brilliant idea; give

Konrad credit for that.9 I share in that idea: old films and new music. Old films are great,

but it can’t be pure retrieval from the archive: it’s about putting something new with it.

Notes

1. ATA is also the home venue of Baldwin‘s Other Cinema. For more on Other Cinema, an “ongoing series of unusual and experimental film,” see http://www.othercinema.com/

2. “Industrials Amok” is a recurring program of industrial and educational films presented at Other Cinema.

3. Em Gee films is an independent distributor of short subject films, located in Reseda, CA.

4. Artists’ Television Access was originally located at 222 Eighth Street in San Francisco. Its destruction by fire circa 1982 led to its relocation to 992 Valencia Street and precipitated Baldwin’s involvement.

5. The interviewer worked at this venue projecting film video for a few months in 1998.

6. Baldwin and the interviewer worked together doing film projection light shows at The Trocadero night-club for ten months circa 1997.


7. This program presented short personal documentary and essayistic works by combining spoken first person narration with projected 3-D slide imagery.

8. This program, guest curated by Christine Metropoulos, paired live music created by local experimental music creators with animated children’s fairytale films.

9. Several years prior to this interview, San Francisco-based curator Konrad Steiner began organizing occasional “Neo-Benshee” events, in which writers and poets would compose text to be read over pre-existing films. This is modeled on the Japanese tradition of supplementing silent-era films with live spoken narration. The speaker in this tradition is known as a benshee. Baldwin’s Other Cinema has hosted Steiner’s events on several occasions.


directions of encounterkenneth white

Directions of Encounter (2007) explores our methods of making narrative and spatial sense

of visual information. Super 8 motion picture film frames are enlarged from their original

dimensions of 4.01 millimeters by 5.46 millimeters to approximately 36 inches by 49 inches

and printed digitally to DURAclear, a transparent plastic. The prints (six total) are suspended

from the ceiling in a curling row approximately 42 inches from the floor and 36 inches from

each other allowing viewers to walk between and around the prints. Projectors at either end

of the row emit video of the original segments of Super 8 film from which the enlarged frames

are printed. The video materializes on the first DURAclear print and also passes through it,

illuminating and projecting each still image on to those following it. Resolution is diminished

with each doubling of still and projection until met by illumination from the opposite direction.

Two sequences provide three frames each for the six prints: a long shot of a fisher-

man reaching to the ground at the shore of Hermit Island, Phippsburg, Maine; the second is

a series of extreme close-ups of ocean water surface at Hermit Island. Presenting the distance

of the figure and the immediacy of the water surface together in the same experience com-

presses the basic foundation of narrative cinematic language: the establishing shot and point-

of-view shot. A viewer may see both perspectives in one reading of the prints and projections.

______

This text originally appeared in Super 8 Today 12 (Winter 2008). Directions of Encounter was first installed in the group show PFVAC + SPACE: New Projections and Installations by the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, from September 5-28, 2007. The Portland Film + Video Artists Collective is committed to the advancement of film and video as personal, experi-mental art forms in Greater Portland. Celebration and preservation of creative freedom is paramount in all actions. .


With their full body, a viewer may at any point walk through the narrative event of the fisher-

man standing, reaching to the ground, standing again, and his supposed sight of the ocean

surface. The projectors at either end of the series present the sequences in movement. The

looped moving images are projected, duplicated, and expanded onto their still selves, the

walls, and the audience.

The cultures of Super 8 and video front-load comprehension of the quintessential

Maine Coast imagery (nostalgic tourism of small gauge filmmaking and nonlinear trans-

formation of digital imaging) that here cross-pollinate. The fisherman reaches to a shore

point-of-view that does not correspond to his moment and place. He reached once on film

but here does so repeatedly in video upon the three-act narrative of his stilled digital self.

The three ocean prints are of the same Hermit Island Atlantic water, but not at the shore of

his moment of looking. Intended result: new narratives of visual language perforated and

transformed by audience encounter.



Kenneth White Directions of Encounter 2007 Images courtesy of the artist.

light is the first bodily formclint enns

Light is the first bodily form pays homage to the philosopher of light, Robert Grosseteste.

The title is intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek since this video was made entirely in

the dark, using only a circuit bent Webcam. No additional computer effects were added

to the video. The music is the song “Rain Serenade” by Natural Snow Buildings.

Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage electronics. I believe that I

am the first person to circuit bend a Webcam. However, circuit bending of other video

equipment, such as the Fisher Price PXL 2000, is common.

Light is the first bodily form can be viewed online at: http://www.incite-online.net

>> ... all that sense can comprehend, is Light: because it partaktes of

that which it is. To comprehend dark, or a shape, it must withdraw

from its own nature – it must withdraw or turn against its own

electrical illuminating nature in order to comprehend a shape.1

_____

1. “Stan Brakhage – The Text of Light,” Cantrills Filmnotes 21/22, (April 1975). This text is a trans-cription of the introduction and the question-and-answer session after a screening of Brakhage’s film, The Text of Light (1974). Brakhage was paraphrasing from Robert Grosseteste’s work, On Light, or the Ingression of Forms.


Clint Enns North to South: Circuit bent Webcam used in the making of light is the first bodily form (2007); still from light is the first bodily form. Images courtesy of the artist.


RAMers generation manifestryan tebo

We demand a positive philosophy

Enough pandering to fundamentalists

We want an open, plural society

We embrace the ironic and absurd

over the sarcastic and sublime

Truth belongs to 18th Century Monarchies

and 20th Century Colonial Regimes

We are collected individuals and, as such,

have had our fill of dystopic (myopic) visions

of what society could/should/will (not) be

What we need now is an infusion of utopian enthusiasms

If by breaking glasses or by shouting, Truth can be told, then I have broken 7 glasses.

Have I spoken greater Truth than you?

>> From the Bollywood film, Taal (1999)

_____

Written summer 2007.


THE NEW SINCERE

What if ‘68 hadn’t succumbed to a drug-induced, hedonist (complacent) apathy?

Let us envision our utopias with wide-open eyes

with an aware, committed naivety

++

As someone on the vanguard of the RAM generation, I issue these:

AESTHETICS of SINCERITY

1. No negative restrictions (we say this is what we do, instead of what we cannot do)

2. Continuity is provided by the witness’s (viewer/listener/reader) experience of our

work

3. Frame is a fluid, and layered, concept

4. Meaning is open (contingent and creative, not fixed and destructive)

5. Material for work comes from more than one source

6. More than one defining style is preferred

7. Public transportation, walking, or biking is used by all involved in production

of work

8. This is decidedly an urban experience

9. Decision making is shared when possible

10. *

* Each individual work determines this last aesthetic.

Random

Access

Memory

generation


This is a re-description of a generation of North Americans and their shift in ways of process-

ing and producing. I was born in 1974 and came of age in the 1980s. What distinguishes me

from my parents’ generation is the fact that for them the dominant, popular information and

entertainment technology was the television, whereas for those of us born in the mid-1970s and

later this technology is, obviously, the computer. What interests me about this shift in gen-

erations is not so much the way that the technology itself functions, but the way this newer

technology has shaped its users. To understand this shaping I use the metaphor of Random

Access Memory (RAM).

Nonlinear narrative experience (RAM workflow of computers) is second nature to

RAM generation (RAMers) and defines cognitive comprehension and development of identity,

communication, relationships (between people, between technologies and between people

and technologies), etc. Active participation and interactivity are fundamental to this experi-

ence: multi-tasking (including dual, and now more, processing) and many simultaneous frames

and windows provide many possible, layered meanings and ways of interpreting information.

History, as well as memory and identity, is no longer a timeline. It is accessed like a computer

accesses data, fluidly and non-sequentially. This is opposed to the receptive, passive pro-

cessing of Read Only Memory (ROM), which can metaphorically be used to describe a pre-

RAM generation (ROMers) consciousness.

>> The information bomb exploded in the early 1990s, when computer networks attained a critical speed and scale, flipping the gates wide open to unleash a torrent of blinding, deafening code — a thunderous explosion of advertising, entertainment, voice, and data. Now, we must negotiate continuous, relentless input. We have become the organic components of an integrated global data and information system… interactivity is required to become media literate, and it is highly recommended for counteracting the numbing effects of the I-bomb.

1

Truth has been replaced with informations

And now it’s big business dealing with the distribution of and access to informations.

Now it’s about how one uses (if one is able to) not about what one has. But we must be

careful not to let a ROMers definition of ownership, as a strictly profitable thing, remain

dominant and dominating.


In a RAMers context,

Ownership is:

unstable

transient

collective

borrowed and loaned

becoming obsolete

specificity of contexts is dissolving

information must be able to exist comfortably in any context

now everything is out of place

everything needs an address

but addresses change faster than information is delivered

The new RAM-generated narrative is believable, but not necessarily realistic

My narrative is pre-meditated

Not pre-determined

This is not a definitive statement. […]

I put my ear to the ground and, like Cage in the anechoic chamber, I feel my own nervous

system and all I can hear is the pulsing of blood by a human heart. I am alive.

Morality is private

Ethics are public

Revolution is a public act-expression.

Aesthetics is a private experience.

Religion (metaphysics) precludes continual self-redescription

because everything is already pre-(de)scribed.


ROMer-defined Ownership is not a mark of responsibility; it is an assertion of authority.

Aesthetics are not a direct political act. Aesthetics and politics can exist simultaneously

but private and public cannot be united.

This is not an argument.

[…]

What is a revolutionary aesthetics?

It is not a commodity. Once it becomes a commodity it stops spinning.

The potential Revolution of the 1960s was bought, and snuffed, out: assassinations and tokens

(sedating illusions of change).

not-for-profit

Revolution will fail if there is (the fear of) something to lose (no matter how small).

the same goes for aesthetics:

the more fear of losing an audience

the more conservative will be the aesthetics

the suppression and repression of avant-garde aesthetics signals the change from socialist

revolutionary society to totalitarian state. Stalin, the Cultural Revolution: mandating the

so-called social-realism. This did not happen in Cuba, though.

My main problem with Marx and his descendents is his appeal to Hegel’s end of history.

A revolutionary aesthetic is necessary for revolution and social change.

“When you change the way you play your instrument, you change the way you think, which

will change the way you live [and act].”2


“We choose to compose our immediate information environment from multiple sources,

mixing our multilayered reality on the spot.”3

All nationalism is separatism

Do unity and difference have to be at odds?

Solidarity and contingency

We can reject fundamentalisms

And still call for solidarity

Change must grow from the ground.

It cannot be imposed from above.

[…]

I don’t learn (know) things; I figure things out.

“To see the aim of a just and free society as letting its citizens be as privitistic, ‘irrationalist,’

and aestheticist as they please so long as they do it on their own time — causing no harm

to others and using no resources needed by those less advantaged.”4

Redefine success and prosperity.

We must challenge our audience with our work, but avoid alienating them by being

excessively esoteric.

John Cage said that his music wouldn’t be successful if it couldn’t survive its audience.

This is why he saw the noises the audience produced as part of the music and performance.

The work shouldn’t exist in an anechoic chamber without an audience.


in accordance with narrative (faith-based; private)

vs.

in accordance with fact (reality-based; public)

a developing approach to aesthetics:

abstraction + reference + emotional complexity

“non-participation in anything you believe is evil”5

I will never hear clean beauty again, only sound-information; like a busted speaker,

paper rattling in the sound-wind-waves.

Pete Seeger about music:

It’s not about whether or not it’s good

It’s what it’s good for

Mary Pipher about writing:

Moral Imagination is lacking in US

The job of a writer is to help other people grow their moral imagination6

[…]

public or private

vs.

public and private

“Only metaphysicians think that our present genres and criteria exhaust the realm of possibility.

Ironists continue to expand that realm.”7

“Create the taste by which one judges oneself”8


sublimity is beyond all perspectives (contingencies)

sublimity is beyond beautiful

to seek the sublime is to betray one’s perspectivalism and anti-essentialism (of an ironist)

the floating and falling blood-veins of my eyes are forever now projected onto everything I

see outside my eyes (open or closed).

***

metaphysics — metanarrative

What basis are we left with for critique?

Self-creation and social responsibility cannot be synthesized…self-discovery and political

utility cannot be united9

I must spend some time away from computer, TV, media (even other people), in order to

become human again. The cyclothymic alternations between anxiety and alienation are a

particular symptom of the RAM epoch. For my own mental and physical well-being I must

spend time both brooding alone indoors and walking outdoors

“Blanking is not attention deficit disorder (ADD) or daydreaming (dd), but a breakdown of

consciousness brought about by sensory and cognitive overextension induced by hyper-

connectivity.”10

Personal narrative

Social action

[…]

Not just the hair, but also the flesh on my scalp, seems to be receding and my skull to be more

and more prominent. Not skin and bones, but bones and nerves.


All peripherals have been ejected.

Remaining Inventory:

1 Vat

1 Brain

“You think you’re radical

But you’re not so radical

In fact, you’re fanatical”11

What makes someone fanatical is an inability, or unwillingness, to be self-critical-reflexive

and, to a lesser extent, an awareness of contingency.

There is a quietness to truly independent cinematic narrative developing, which (to me as a

viewer) is responding to the obnoxious loudness of advertising and most of popular culture.

This quietness is an embrace of subtlety. The recent public embrace of Bela Tarr could stem

from this. The patient reflection in his films is in this new narrative sensibility.

>> To create today is to create dangerously…The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible. In most cases the artist is ashamed of himself and his privileges, if he has any. He must first of all answer the question he has put to himself: is art a deceptive luxury?…In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie…We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together…Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda…The time of irresponsible artists is over.

12

Instead of providing obvious and expected (right) answers to viewers,

guide them to better questions.

The way we tell stories is changing. And the way we hear them, too.

Above all else one must learn to live with uncertainty. To live uncertainly.

**


>> To not overlook the lagging lay public; to not fear too much the obvious or the oversimplified; to not be afraid to be attacked as ‘artist’s artist;’ to beat down the aesthetically insensitive and the politically indecent; to fight the foul in art, too, to the finish – these things we look at as good.

13

I want to view my personal, private beliefs and experiences as parallel and simultaneous to my

social, public policies and actions. This is the difference between morality (metaphysics: what

we think and feel in private) and ethics (politics: how we act in public society). Therefore,

politics should be founded on the principle of not imposing a specific metaphysics, but rather

to encourage and legislate policies that allow for as many metaphysics as there are people.

Aesthetics is the private choice and experience of a maker(s) expressed to an audience. Using a

particular aesthetic can be a radical political act, but the actual aesthetic itself remains uniquely

private (thus there is no absolutely right aesthetic). The American painter Ad Reinhardt fascinates

and inspires me because of this apparent contradiction. He was an active member of the

American Communist Party in his public life, but as an artist and private individual he chose

an aesthetic based on the idea of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Yet, he was critically aware that his art-

works existed publicly and refused to allow them to become commodities. He even refused

or returned prize money. However, while Reinhardt was adamant that art was only about

art (the private metaphysics of his aesthetics do not directly relate to or inform a public

politics), he still says (quoting himself) that, “art is a weapon.”

>> We saw (through a wine-glass) how painting in past periods freed itself from ‘story,’ ‘subject- matter’ and ‘skill,’ from ‘fixed, final’ ideas, from ‘flux, fusion, feeling’ and ‘flicker’ conceptions until it became flatly no picture but a ‘field’ of color-activity. Today painting has a different meaning from a picture. Instead of succumbing to the pressure (which also produces fascism) for hand-painted pictures (which deadens your mind), free yourself from your frustrations and paint yourself. Art is not a bag of trade-tricks or hack-skills, a property of the few, but a dangerous propaganda for changing and controlling the world so that everyone can be creative… We saw that the elements in modern painting, as in modern\music and jazz, come forward from their flat plane to face the onlooker honestly for his active participation instead of vanishing in the distance through an illusionistic ‘hole-in-the-wall’…

14

Art is not valuable because of what it gives to you, it is valuable because of the process

of giving meaning as a viewer/listener/reader. A particular aesthetic can be a radical political

act by being in opposition to a conventional, commodified aesthetic, which pressures society


toward passively accepting fascism. What is radical about Reinhardt’s aesthetic is its opposition

to the deadening of people’s minds (one could make a similar argument against popular,

conventional television, music, and Hollywood) and the way his paintings challenges their

viewers’ to be active participants in the art-experience. If we learn that we can give (create)

some meaning as audience, not just receive it obediently, we might become more intelligent,

informed, and active citizens, as well. There is nothing in the aesthetic itself that produces this,

though. It is in our confrontation with aesthetics where revolution lies.

Notes

1. Tom Sherman, “After the I-Bomb” (1999), in Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, ed. Peggy Gale (Banff: The Banff Centre Press, 2002), pp. 2-3.

2. Dror Feiler, in conversation with the author, April 2007.

3. Tom Sherman, “Blanking________” (1996), in Before and After the I-Bomb, p. 4.

4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xiv.

5. The Books, “There is No There: sampling Einstein,” United Nations radio interview recorded in Einstein's study, Princeton, New Jersey (1950).

6. Mary Pipher, interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, August 29, 2007. The Seeger quote is cited by Pipher in the interview.

7. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 135.

8. Ibid., p. 106.

9. Ibid., p. 120.

10. Tom Sherman, “Blanking________,” p. 4.

11. Flaming Lips, “Free Radicals (A Hallucination Of The Christmas Skeleton Pleading With A Suicide Bomber),” At War With The Mystics, Warner Bros. Records, 2006.

12. Albert Camus. “Create Dangerously (Lecture given at the University of Uppsala in December 1957),” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage International, 1995), pp. 251-253, 258, 268, 271.

13. Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at Things Again: a forthright, fun-loving, fortnightly feature on modern art by Ad Reinhardt…the thirteenth and a rough recapitulation of a series showing why a. the Best pictures today are not paintings b. the Best paintings today are not pictures.” This text appeared in PM, an afternoon tabloid published in New York City between 1940 and 1948 by Ralph Ingersoll.

14. Ibid.



notes on contributors

Based in Toronto, the Association for Film Art (AfFA) is a coalition of filmmakers,

educators, curators, and critics who have come together to promote film art and encourage

conditions favorable to its continued flourishing. They share a common commitment to the

medium of film (photochemical emulsion, projected on film) as an art form. AfFA advocates

on behalf of film art to funders, cultural institutions, educational institutions, the media, and

others.

L'Atelier national du Manitoba is an art club and filmmaking collective based in Winnipeg.

Born in Oakland, California, Craig Baldwin attended the University of California at Santa

Barbara, University of California at Davis, and San Francisco State University (Masters, 1986).

In the Department of Cinema there, he studied under Bruce Conner and became increasingly

drawn to collage film form. His interest in the re-contextualization of “found” imagery

led him to the theories of the Situationist International and to various practices of mail art,

‘zines, altered billboards, and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional

fine-arts curriculum. His current project, Mock Up on Mu satirizes the impending militarization

of space.

Born in Detroit and currently living in Toronto, Scott Berry has been involved in artist-

organized collectives and organizations for 15+ years. He is an arts administrator at the Images

Festival by day and a reference library lover by night. An intermittent filmmaker and

programmer, he has shown most recently at the 2008 Berlin and Rotterdam Film Festivals.

Miller is currently on the Boards of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, the Eight

Fest Small Gauge Film Festival, and the Rendez-vous with Madness Film Festival. He co-

founded Dumba and Brooklyn Babylon Cinema in 1996 while living in Brooklyn and is a

Pisces with Cancer rising.


Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist, museum curator, and multi-disciplinary artist.

He has exhibited his movies, site-specific installations, and non-traditional art forms in unseen,

unusual, or public spaces since 1992. His blog is located at www.cinegraphic.net

Carl Brown, a graduate of Sheridan College's film school, has developed a distinctive style

of working in film. Hand-processing and then toning and tinting hi-con stock creates movement,

colour and texture within the emulsion that is stunning to the eye. Brown’s films have been

shown widely internationally. His film Re: Entry was screened at the Louvre, Paris in the

Fall of 1995 to launch the book, Constraste Simultane La Couleur Une Histoire De Cinema

Experimental Anthologie. Brown also works as a photographer, holographer, and writer.

Gerda Cammaer is a film scholar, curator, and filmmaker. As a scholar and a maker she

specializes in experimental and documentary film. She is currently working on a major film/

video project that builds upon her passion for collage film, documentary and new narrative

as part of her PhD thesis. Cammaer is also a free-lance programmer of Canadian experimental

film and video. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson

University in Toronto.

Jonathan Comeau is the Managing Editor of INCITE! and a recent graduate of Oberlin

College. His interests include reaction, spirituality, minimalism, performance, and technology.

Founded in 2004, the Double Negative Collective (le collectif Double négatif) is a Montreal-

based group of film, video, and installation artists dedicated to creating, curating, and

disseminating experimental film. Current members include: Christopher Becks, Lucia Fezzuoglio,

Amber Goodwyn, Julien Idrac, Steven Ladouceur, Matt Law, Karl Lemieux, Lindsay McIntyre,

Eduardo Menz, Christopher Payne, Mike Rollo, Daïchi Saïto, Ithamar Silver, and Malena Szlam.

Dumba was a queer community space, performance room, and live/work warehouse in Vinegar

Hill, Brooklyn that hosted 200+ events between 1996 and 2007. Founded by a group of folks

committed to returning 90% of the door funds to the musicians, filmmakers, and presenters

in the space, Dumba was politically active in the anti-Giuliani “Quality of Life” years, hosting

fundraisers for direct actions, tenant/housing groups, the annual “Gay Shame,” feminist and

environmental activism, microradio as well as numerous art and/or political collectives in addition

to the monthly microcinema Brooklyn Babylon Cinema. Perhaps best known as the inspiration

for the lusty parties in the film Shortbus (which was partially filmed there), Dumba was evicted

in the winter of 2007 and her herstory lives on the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumba


Clint Enns resides in Winnipeg and is currently a Masters student in mathematics at the

University of Manitoba. His interests include cinema, model theory of rings and modules,

natural language as a biological phenomenon, and the logical vocabulary of natural language.

Enns has been an avid cine-phile for many years, and has only recently started making films.

He is currently a member of the Winnipeg Film Group and Video Pool.

Rick Hancox teaches film in the Communications Department of Concordia University in

Montreal, and studied film and photography at NYU and Ohio University, where he earned

his MFA. He is known as an artistic innovator of experimental and personal documentary

films, including Moose Jaw (There’s a Future in Our Past), LANDFALL, and Waterworx

(A Clear Day and No Memories), which are in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

He taught for twelve years at Sheridan College near Toronto, where he influenced some of

Canada’s foremost experimental filmmakers, including Mike Hoolboom, Richard Kerr,

and Philip Hoffman.

Brett Kashmere is a Pittsburgh-based filmmaker, curator, and Visiting Assistant Professor

of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. He is also the founding editor of INCITE!

Richard Kerr is a practitioner/teacher who works out of the Mel Hoppenheim School of

Cinema in Montreal. In Fall of 2008, he was Professor of Distinction at Ryerson University,

School of Image Arts, in Toronto.

Active within Toronto’s experimental film community from 2000 thru 2003, The League was

a group of four emerging artists (Christina Battle, Sara MacLean, Julie Saragosa, and

Michèle Stanley) dedicated to working with traditional, handmade filmmaking techniques.

The League’s main goal was to create collaborative new works in an environment that was

both open and supportive. By rejecting formal screening rooms, they strove to broaden their

audience by presenting films in unique and non-conventional venues. Geographically separated

since 2003, the League is currently on hiatus with hopes to rekindle collaborations at some

point in the near future.

Karl Lemieux studied cinema at Concordia University and has created several short films

including The Bridge, KI, Motion of Light, Western Sunburn, Trash and No Star! and Passage.

He is a co-founder of Double Negative, a film collective based in Montreal focused on the

production and screening of experimental film. Lemieux has also worked on several music

and performance-based live projections.


Scott MacKenzie is cross-appointed to the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of

French at the University of Toronto. He is co-editor of Cinema and Nation (Routledge, 2000)

and Purity and Provocation: Dogma '95 (BFI, 2003) and author of Screening Québec:

Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester UP, 2004).

He is currently completing Films into Uniform: Film Manifestos and Cinema Culture.

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. He currently lives and works in New

York. For over half a century, Mekas has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde

filmmaking or the “New American Cinema,” as he dubbed it in the late 50s, playing various

roles: in 1954, he became editor and chief of Film Culture; in 1958 he began writing his

“Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice; in 1962 he co-founded the Film-Makers’

Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into

Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-

garde films. His own output ranges from narrative films to documentaries to “diaries,”

which have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. The Jonas

Mekas Visual Arts Center was established in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2007.

Regina Muff writes, “I am white and documented as a legitimate human being, bipedal and

socialized as member of the privileged species, do radical politics, love the unoccupied

environment, demand my pleasure, deconstruct logocentrism, wear cameras, am turned on

by defiance, defend solitude, subvert authority, oppose eurocentrism, await redemption, invite

sacrilege, prefer outcasts, and have no regrets.”

Solomon Nagler is a Canadian filmmaker originating from Winnipeg. His films and curated

programs have played across Canada, in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Retrospectives of

his work have been featured in Paris (Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris), Montreal

(Ex-Centris), and Winnipeg (Cinematheque). Nagler is currently a full-time professor of Film

Production at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.

Georgette Nicolaides is a writer, visual artist, naturalized Texan, and not-so-gracefully

aging punk rocker. She has contributed violin sounds to the ambient improvisational project

Atlantic Drone (Noiseville Records). She currently resides in upstate New York and teaches

managerial statistics at Syracuse University.

Peter Nowogrodzki is the Art Director of INCITE! and a recent graduate of Oberlin

College. www.ppeternnowogrodzki.com


Steve Polta is a filmmaker, sound artist, occasional writer, and occasional historian living

in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the Archivist and Artistic Director of San Francisco

Cinematheque and a once-in-a-while radio DJ on KALX Berkeley. He holds a BA in Film

Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, and

will soon receive a Masters of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.

He makes his living as a taxi driver in San Francisco.

Originally from Japan, Daichi Saito currently lives in Montreal. After studying philosophy

in the US and Hindi and Sanskrit in India, he turned to filmmaking in Montreal. He is a co-

founder of the Double Negative Collective, a Montreal-based artist filmmaking group

dedicated to experimental cinema. His films are distributed by Light Cone in Paris.

Leslie Supnet is a self-taught visual artist based in Winnipeg. She deals with various subject

matter and themes, such as identity, isolation, and nostalgia, all with a touch of whimsy and

the surreal. Her illustrations capture recognizable sentiment, making them accessible

without sacrificing poetic eloquence. www.sundaestories.com

Formed in 2006 by local filmmakers Kyle Corea, Brett Kashmere, Sebastien Park, and Ryan

Tebo, Syracuse Experimental was a grassroots cooperative dedicated to the development

of first person film and media. The group dissolved in 2007 but its spirit lives on in these pages.

Ryan Tebo was born in Buffalo, New York in 1974. He is currently a Visiting Assistant

Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Tebo is an artist working with film,

video, and photography, as well as being a free-improvising musician. Provisional utopic

visions along with skeptical awareness to counter cynical power structures seemingly

absolute. Cooperation before competition.

Leslie Topness is a letterpress printer and sometimes book-maker, sometimes teacher, some-

times cat-adopter. She made the covers for this journal on the tabletop Golding No. 5 in

her bedroom. Her previous letterpress and book making ventures may be found hidden in

various public and private collections across North America (mostly in the garage, under

her desk, or at the bottom of a well).

Kenneth White is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and programmer. He is a founding member

of the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective in Portland, Maine. White received his BFA

from Syracuse University in 2005. In fall 2008, White began doctoral studies in art history

at Stanford University. www.kennethwhiteprojects.com
