Built on a Lie: Propaganda, Pedagogy, and the Origins of the Kuleshov Effect
It is normally forgotten that the word “propaganda” derives from the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a committee of cardinals first convened by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to take charge of foreign missions, and in existence—now operating under the moniker given it by Pope John Paul II, Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples—to this day. Propaganda thus refers historically to education. This meaning has been largely lost to us, for whom “propaganda” tends to connote a purely (and tendentiously) rhetorical rather than pedagogical practice, even if, in some modern languages—Argentine Spanish, for instance—the word’s range of reference usefully extends beyond specifically political rhetoric to include commercial advertising.
The social-democratic tradition that informed early Soviet propaganda practice, however, sustained a keen awareness of propaganda’s roots in teaching and the slow work of conversion, no doubt both due to a familiarity with the Catholic institution and because of an association, perhaps not wholly derogatory, of revolutionary teachings with “propaganda” that seems to have taken shape after 1789. Indeed, the early Soviets crucially distinguished the pedagogical labor of propaganda from more spectacular and temporally condensed interventions known as agitation. The difference between “agit” and “prop” has been slighted or ignored in some of the historical literature on “Soviet propaganda,” where “agitprop” tends to be seen as a diffuse cluster of practices of persuasion, political pedagogy, and/or mind control. For the study and especially the close (p. 220) formal analysis of early Soviet media practice, however, it is an indispensable distinction of which historian Matthew Lenoe provides the best account:
According to Lenin, propaganda involved extended theoretical explanations of the socioeconomic processes that underlay surface phenomena such as unemployment. By appealing to audience members’ reason, the propagandist aimed to cultivate in them a whole new worldview. Propaganda was a process of education that required a relatively sophisticated, informed audience. Agitation, on the other hand, motivated the audience to action by appealing to their emotions with short, stark stories. The agitator did not seek to change his listeners’ worldview, but to mobilize them. Agitation was the tool of choice for unsophisticated, even ignorant audiences when quick action was required. Definitions from the first edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia link propaganda with education and agitation with organization/mobilization.
Perhaps the distinction survives for us today primarily in the recoded form of the now-familiar opposition between a “cinema of attractions” and narrative cinema, with (in Tom Gunning’s words) the “theatrical display” of the former pitted against the “narrative absorption” of the latter. Gunning indicates that he derived the term “attraction” from the early writings of Sergei Eisenstein, of course; and the Eisensteinian pedigree strongly suggests the rootedness of “attraction,” at least in its Soviet manifestations, in social-democratic ideas about the agitation-propaganda distinction—ultimately reworked by Eisenstein into the contrast between “attraction” and “intellectual montage”— as much as in popular entertainments and fairground displays. At any rate, the difference between agitation and propaganda was fully and productively operative for activists, constructivist designers (like Aleksei Gan), filmmakers (like Dziga Vertov), and other “cultural workers” engaged in building a new communist society in the 1920s.
To be sure, the Russian Orthodox Church, which the militantly atheistic Bolsheviks hoped to extirpate, had had no “congregatio de propaganda” as such. Yet the Church had promoted much “propagation of the faith” in Russia, and the long pre-revolutionary tradition of what would later be called “religious propaganda”—mobilizing printed publications, imagery, ritual, oral preaching, and much else—would have been familiar to Soviet activists. Indeed, they would have taken it as a given that Orthodox faith, far from being autochthonous, had been nourished by propaganda, which they would meet with counter-propaganda—much as Vertov would counterpoise his own nonfictional and experimental film practice to the “opiate” of mainstream fictional cinema as well. One of Vertov’s proposed but never-used intertitles for his One Sixth of the World (1926), written in Futurist-agitational poetic style, makes the association clear:
Here is
A machine
The long-range weapon of the bourgeoisie
Bourgeois agitprop
Capital educates at a distance
Together with God’s word
Together with the
Bible and beads Moves the filmstrip
1970s Experimental Films: Then and Now
The Girl Chewing Gum, John Smith (courtesy of the artist)
The Man Phoning Mum, John Smith (courtesy of the artist)
The films discussed here include a number from Sherwin’s ‘Short Film Series’ (1975-2014) and two of his abstract films, Cycles (1972) and Rem-Jet Loops (2015, made with Lynn Loo); Le Grice’s Matrix (1973) and its later incarnations Matrix 73-06 (2006) and Marking Time (2015); Raban’s River Yar (1971-72), South Foreland (2007), Angles of Incidence (1973) and About Now MMX (2010); and Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) and The Man Phoning Mum (2012). A number of questions were posed to the filmmakers, with the initial intention being to incorporate responses within this essay. The responses were, however, generously detailed and insightful and it therefore seemed invaluable to include them as appendices to the discussions.
Sherwin was an early LFMC member, with his commitment to using 16mm film sustained through his continued interest in (amongst other preoccupations) light and time. His ‘Short Film Series’ (1975 – 2014), spanning almost four decades, takes the simple format of a 100 foot roll of black-and-white 16mm film, and more often than not focuses on the single subject of the title, with filming akin to a beautifully composed photograph, revealing subtle changes in light, movement, tonal range or focus. The subject of Portrait with Parents (1975) is echoed in the more recent Guy and Kai (2013). Both are portraits of the title’s subjects, although the former is a wider shot including Sherwin’s parents, who are standing either side of an oval mirror, above a mantelpiece, showing the filmmaker’s reflection (as he films with a hand-cranked camera). Guy and Kai is more tightly framed, with father and son’s heads and shoulders filling the frame, calling to mind Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964-66) and Peter Gidal’s Heads (1969). In Sherwin’s Yi Wei (2011) the close-up of an eye draws on his distinctly similar, earlier films Eye (1978) and Blink (1977). And in Mei (2010) Sherwin has recorded, in close-up, the features of his very young daughter Mei, echoing an earlier film of his first daughter Maya (1978).
A number of Sherwin’s 1970s films focused on windows include Window (1976) and Barn (1978), a subject he has revisited in the later Window/Light (2013). All three films have a fixed point of view, namely the camera looking out of a window. Barn shows a view across a field (of wheat or corn perhaps) with the barn doors on either side framing the scene that includes trees and passing clouds. Throughout the film flashes of light illuminate the pastoral scene making sharp contrasts within the monochrome image. Window opens with a black screen (instead of a white one, as most of the films from the series do) and slowly progresses – by adding more light – to reveal a large window divided into sections, with handles also evident. The view outside the window shows domestic buildings on the road opposite and the film ends when it flares out into white light. The recent Window/Light (2013) includes the image, gradually increased in exposure, of a high window looking out onto a breeze-blown tree in leaf. The superimposed image of a light-bulb also appears intermittently, at times flaring out the scene with its light. The light-bulb’s detailed filament is sometimes revealed, which is perhaps a nod to the demise of the light bulb as we have known it since its invention, having been replaced by new energy saving ‘long life’ bulbs.
While these films show a personal engagement with earlier work, it is particularly in Sherwin’s re-invigoration of the earlier abstract work, such as Cycles (1972-77) from the ‘Optical Sound Film’ series, that some interesting new departures can be found in Rem-Jet Loops (2015) for example. The original is a 16mm single screen film in which Sherwin produced sound and image by working directly onto the filmstrip with paper dots stuck on, or holes punched into, the filmstrip. Sherwin here explored equivalences between sound and the ‘persistence of vision’, identifying differences between units of time in film (24 frames per second) and sound (e.g. 72 beats per second), thereby creating a dialogue between visual and aural perception. During projection, as the frequency of dots on the filmstrip increase, they eventually become a pulsating ball of light. Together with the sound “the film highlights the different sensitivities in our visual and aural senses”. 1
While Cycles is a piece for standard film projection, the more recent Rem-Jet Loops (2015), a collaboration with Lynn Loo, is performed with three projectors. In a recent article Sherwin has discussed the path that he has taken in his re-engagement with Cycles, which was invigorated by his interest in expanded cinema with live projection, and his partnership with Loo. Cycles gave rise to Cycles #3 (1972/2003) which uses two 16mm projectors running identical prints, superimposed and out of phase by about a minute. For Sherwin Cycles #3 , “gave rise to fascinating and unpredictable pulsing of image and sound” which was extended by “making subtle shifts of size, volume, focus and timbre during projection”, making it “possible to modulate spatial and rhythmic fluctuations as a strong component of the work”. 2
These possibilities are extended in Rem-Jet Loops, which involves three projectors, optical sound, an equaliser, contact microphones and an intermittently used radio, with Loo and Sherwin operating projectors and sound mix simultaneously. Its handmade film loops include imagery and optical sound produced by an equivalent physical action, with numerous possibilities opened up to modulate sound and image through the use of wide lenses, contact and light sensitive microphones and projector movement within the space. Additional attention is given to the overall quality of sound, with Sherwin suggesting that “perhaps in this work we have come closest to the condition of improvised music with its high degree of flexibility and immediacy in performance – qualities that are hard to achieve with film.” 3
Interestingly, Malcolm Le Grice has also drawn comparison with music in his re-engagement with earlier works, noting that jazz musicians might produce a ‘new’ performance for an earlier composition but one which ‘closely retains the “original” composition’. This is not too surprising however, as music has influenced his work conceptually and is also evident in the soundtrack of seminal early films like Little Dog for Roger (1967) and Berlin Horse (1970).
Berlin Horse, Malcolm Le Grice (courtesy of the artist)
Le Grice started filmmaking in the 1960s and was instrumental in the establishment of the workshop at the LFMC. Alongside the structural/materialist filmmaker Peter Gidal, his theoretical writings and filmmaking were influential in shaping understandings of formalist filmmaking which was prevalent at the LFMC in the 1960s and ’70s. Although Le Grice made distinctive and seminal works in film, he also embraced video and digital (computer-generated) technologies early on, with his interests in ‘the politics of perception’, viewer engagement, film form and materiality informing both his filmmaking and theoretical writings.
Le Grice’s film Matrix (1973) has some resonance with Sherwin’s abstract films and their modernist overtones. References to colour field painters like Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still are evident in Matrix, with the work consisting of six looped films of optically printed solid colour blocks. Each film consists of two colour blocks divided horizontally by a black line with the quiet stillness of a colour field painting subverted through movement, and a soundtrack produced on a Zinovief ‘Putney’ analogue synthesizer. The films are projected simultaneously with six projectors, eliciting a dynamism absent in stationary 2D paintings. Le Grice also moves the projectors around mid-performance, ensuring an active space of projection. Each screening of Matrix is distinctive due to the live-action projection, rendering the colour fields as an active exploration of colour, space, light and film apparatus, making each event a singular, unrepeatable work. While the performance of the piece is improvised, a consistently similar pattern evolves as the six projectors are moved, firstly with the screens overlapping and superimposed, then moving outwards to form six complete screens in two rows of three. Improvisation with diverse patterns continues as the image is progressively de-focused and the screens eventually return to the centre. Matrix evolves with a sense of dynamism, materialising as it does through the expanded projection event.
Over thirty years later the earlier work was revisited for ‘Matrix 73-06’ (2006), closely based on the original concept and broadly following documentation of a 2004 screening performance. The 2006 re-engagement is a video installation, simulating the appearance of a film projection with softened screen edges including four full screen images within the single video frame. Shown on three video projectors, the total number of apparent ‘screens’ are doubled, maintaining the symmetry of the original piece in the new format. The colour has also been re-generated digitally to compensate for the lack of intensity in the telecine of the original film loops. Where the new work differs from its original is in the ‘sharpness’ of the digital version, the lack of material traces of film, and in the fact that movements are constructed rather than spontaneous. The film version always gives rise to spontaneous new iterations in the moment of its projection, whereas the digital doesn’t offer such possibilities. One could argue that this removes a certain spontaneity or ‘aliveness’ which was integral to the expanded cinema pieces, yet digital technology has allowed Le Grice to reconfigure the piece at the ‘production stage’ leading to new avenues of exploration In a recent retrospective exhibition, Le Grice presented his newest rendition of the earlier work, Marking Time (2015). Here Le Grice has extended the depth of ‘film’ space by using 3D video technology, with the colour fields (echoing the earlier film) overlapping, intersecting, receding and advancing.
2’45, William Raban (courtesy of the artist)
William Raban, a contemporary of Le Grice’s, also worked extensively at the LFMC in the 1970s, and engaged in formal, structural and material experimentation with film, in seminal works such as 2’45” (1973) in which a film of audience members entering an auditorium was repeatedly filmed, processed and projected, with each new film including the previous event’s projection. The focus of Raban’s filmmaking since the 1970s includes preoccupations eloquently described in his recent professorial address:
In terms of using film to materialise time, I have identified two distinct strands in my work. I have described the processes that are at work in About Now MMX (2010) that make this film an example of fragmentary time with a lineage that goes back to some of the initial structural film experiments from the 1970s. Whereas, I have also explored ways of materialising time in Thames Film (1986), Island Race (1996), The Houseless Shadow (2011), Time and the Wave (2013) and most recently 72-82 (2014), that seem to be more about continuous time. Nevertheless, the obsession with materiality of time remains a singularly consistent aspect of my entire body of practice. 4
In Raban’s early exploration of time, Angles of Incidence (1973), the ‘axis of camera rotation’ and the shifting minor changes in viewpoint were explored by attaching a rope between a camera (fixed to a tripod) and a central point in a large window. In the more recent film About Now MMX Raban similarly created a cinematic map of east London from the fixed aerial viewpoint of Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, where the camera tracked across the city using time-lapse exposures emphasizing the ‘frame-by-frameness of the film’s construction to produce a sense of fragmentary time’ that has resonances with 1970s films like Angles of Incidence’. 5
River Yar, William Raban and Chris Welsby (courtesy of William Raban and LUX, London)
In an earlier collaboration with Chris Welsby on their seminal 1970s film River Yar (1971-72), technological, structural and procedural approaches were used to document the landscape. A tidal estuary was filmed over three weeks during the spring and autumn equinoxes, referencing the landscape tradition but also offering insights into duration, light and cinematographic recording devices. Despite certain controlled filmmaking conditions the work also allowed for incidental occurrences to enter into the work, with the two-screen film consisting of real-time footage of sunrise and sunset and time-compression sequences where the swift rush of time is evident in the changing patterns of light, nature, day and night, thereby compressing the time of the seasonal equinoxes and revealing dialogues between film content and cinematographic recording. Echoes of River Yar are evident in Raban’s more recent South Foreland (2007), a two-screen installation (projected on opposing gallery walls) that includes a 3-minute time-lapse film recorded over sixteen hours of a summer day with a soundtrack of foghorns. The time compression and landscape scenes of nature – the sea and fog intermittently rolling in and obscuring the scene – are reiterated from the earlier film, but they are also counter-posed by the addition of a smaller screen which includes images and the sound of a rotating radar scanner, exuding ominous suggestions of surveillance.
Alongside Raban’s persistent preoccupation with the materiality of time is an interest in the urban London landscape seen in 1970s films like Thames Barrier (1977) through to Thames Film (1986) and more recently in About Now MMX. In contrast to these films of Raban’s, which focus on expansive natural or urban landscapes, John Smith’s films are often rooted in a particular place or location, but centre on the details of urban life.
Smith’s seminal film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) uses humour (often lacking in 1970s formalist films) to reveal a disjunction between sound and image that is gradually made apparent to the viewer as the film unfolds. The 12-minute film, composed of two shots, centres on a busy urban intersection in East London, with cars and pedestrians passing by. Smith makes full use here (and in more recent films) of the serendipitous nature of working with the moving image, whereby the incidental or accidental unplanned actions and events are embraced to become a key part of the film. 6
The soundtrack includes the apparently synchronous noise of the busy street with road-works and a burglar alarm, with a voiceover (recorded after filming) initially appearing to be that of a film director instructing the actors’ movements. Although events initially occur as instructed, the viewer soon realises that the scenes being ‘choreographed’ are far too complex for such evidently easy cohesion, as most of the film consists of a wide shot of a busy street corner with cars, buses and pedestrians moving in and out of frame. The humour becomes evident as ‘actors’ and objects in the film seemingly obey the directed orders, which include such banal directives as ‘… and I want the clock to now move jerkily towards me…’ when the camera zooms in to focus on the clock face above a building. The viewer realises that something is clearly up as the narrator (Smith) says: ‘now, two pigeons fly across’ before two birds are seen crossing the screen in flight from left to right. Smith also intersperses his directions with ‘good’, ‘ok’ or ‘now’, adding a sense of banality, as if the actors, birds and clock are obediently following instructions. Before the close of the film, a cut to a change of scenery ‘ambiguously locates the commentator in a distant field’, thereby disclosing the ‘director’s’ possible location (although he may be lying, as suggested by a subsequent reference to the sight of a man with a helicopter in his pocket and the blackbird with the nine-foot wingspan). When watching the film the viewer fairly quickly realises that something is amiss between action and direction, but Smith recognises that this discrepancy is essentially what commercial ‘Hollywood’ cinema is based upon – the idea of narrative illusion, fantasy or make belief – as he discloses in his interview with Tom Harrad:
What I was interested in when making the film is that even once you know that these things aren’t being directed, such is the power of language that there is still a kind of magical quality to the word. Even when you know you’re being lied to, it is still very easy to imagine the scenarios being described. 7
Smith’s work is anti-illusionistic, with The Girl Chewing Gum establishing his fondness for exposing illusions through the interlacing of word-play, image and narrative construction also evident in his films Associations (1975) and Gargantuan (1992). In more recent film like Soft Work (2012) and unusual Red cardigan (2011) Smith continues with a humorous, deadpan voiceover that explains banal events unfolding on the screen with a sense of indifference. Almost forty years later Smith revisited the original location of The Girl Chewing Gum to film The Man Phoning Mum (2012), which was recorded on HD video and in parts superimposed the original film. Here the black and white pedestrians and cars from 1976 meet with their colourful contemporary counterparts in the well-trodden street, oblivious to each other’s existence. There are moments where the two films are transposed, creating an immediacy between past and present as the eye focuses intermittently on either the monochrome image or the colour one. In other parts either the earlier or later film takes central focus. The soundtrack in the later film, however, remains the same. This is indicative, I would suggest, of its central importance to Smith as it instrumentally shapes any reading of the new film, drawing a clear trajectory between past and present, old and new works.
In concluding discussions on the filmmakers’ re-engagement with their 1970s films it is useful to note the significant shifts in the moving image landscape, particularly as accessible technologies have affected the marked rise in artists’/experimental filmmaking. While this marked rise should be seen in a positive light, with experimentation including a diverse range of approaches to moving image practice, there are also concerns that the long histories of experimental film have been underappreciated. I would suggest the fact that the filmmakers discussed here have re-engaged with their earlier works serves a two-fold purpose. It provides the filmmakers (and audiences) with renewed opportunities to interrogate what is at stake regarding the works within the context of the newer digital technologies (or in the case of Sherwin’s practice a continued commitment to film). At the same time, new works that derive from older pieces also point back to antecedent histories, opening up spaces for critical and theoretical reflection on those histories. It is encouraging to see the increased recognition that earlier filmmakers are now receiving in retrospective exhibitions and publications focusing on earlier highly fertile decades, which laid the groundwork for the extensive range of moving image works proliferating and forming part of the present and future trajectories.
Beyond the Cringe: Australia, Britain, and the Post-Colonial Film Avant-Garde
For some decades there has been two-way traffic between the avant-garde film worlds of Australia and the UK. Australian artists arrive from a local scene that continues to resonate with the influences of an avant-garde historically centred in and driven from Western Europe and the United States. The experimental film and video practices that are discussed here encompass a range of critical concerns around form, structure, reflexivity, specificity, material and so on, which have their roots, if not their current philosophical concerns, in the modernist avant-garde. Addressing these practices as ‘post-colonial phenomena’ relates them to a broader constellation of historical cultural concerns. A more inclusive survey of contemporary Australian artists’ moving image would accommodate a larger number of artists who have made significant works explicitly addressing the deeply complex political and cultural conditions of post-colonialism, significantly and in particular as it relates to Indigenous Australia (For example, contemporary artists and filmmakers such as Tracey Moffatt, Vernon Ah Kee, Shaun Gladwell, Destiny Deacon, the late Gordon Bennett, among many others).Many Australian artists and writers have made the UK their home, most commonly London, making what has for some been a kind of rite of passage back to ‘the old country’, as temporary or more permanent residents. As inhabitants of the former colony they may inevitably be descended from British roots, but they tend to have treated Britain not so much as a place of ancestral pilgrimage, but more as a centre of international culture of the kind unimaginable in the apparently Antipodean remoteness of their home country.
In the 1960s Australian experimental filmmakers would make the same journey of cultural migration as the writers associated with the left-wing intelligentsia of the Sydney Push (such as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Richard Neville). Arthur and Corinne Cantrill spent a number of years living and working in London, making documentaries and experimental films, working for the animators Halas and Batchelor and the BBC, honing their practice before returning to Melbourne to establish themselves and their magazine Cantrills Filmnotes as experimental filmmaking forces to be reckoned with. In the early to mid 1970s filmmaker Albie Thoms was a frequent visitor, writing a number of articles about avant-garde film for Australian publications, later collected in Polemics for a New Cinema. Thoms’ fellow Ubu Films founder David Perry lived in London in the early ’70s, where he taught at Hornsey College of Art, and made significant early video works such as Utopian Memory Banks Present Fragments from the Past (1973).
The two-way traffic occasionally manifests itself in the work. The film Thread of Voice (1993) by performance poetry group Arf Arf (Marcus Bergner, Michael Buckley, Frank Lovece and Marisa Stirpe) is part homage, the film opening with footage of British poet Bob Cobbing and his group Koncrete Canticle performing in a pub in London. Like many, Arf Arf made the journey across the hemispheres, returning home from London to Melbourne carrying various influences, including the work of Cobbing and his collaborators which would be incorporated in their work, extended and transformed into particularly local Australian adaptations. As a group working with performed voice and language, Arf Arf proved adept at adapting European avant-garde practices to post-colonial Australian vernacular, noticeably audible in the song Bronson and particularly in the Italian language that runs through Thread of Voice, echoing the multicultural make-up of the group, mirroring Australian migrant culture.
liverpool223355 (digital video 2006-2007) – sue.k.
More recently two Australian artists based in London have produced particularly distinctive bodies of experimental work. sue.k. became known for her uncompromising video work, which uses rigorous processes to mine the paradox of digital media through an obsessive attention to the detail, structuring discrete sequences of fields and frames as though they are physical material, to exploit their immaterial mutability. The results are often startling, visceral and relentless – using processes which, once set in train, pay no heed to the tolerance of the viewer for rapid, iterative shifts in sound and image, for extended algorithmically determined durations. sue.k. also became very involved in the cogcollective organisation of monthly no budget screenings of artists’ work.
Since arriving in London Sally Golding has been extraordinarily active, both as an artist and as curator of Unconscious Archives with James Holcombe. These events present performance and expanded cinema alongside experimental and electronic music. This format of exhibition in the UK is typified by larger events such as Lumen (Leeds), Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee) and the Supernormal festival (Oxfordshire). What distinguishes Unconscious Archives is the intimacy born of a close local community of practitioners with frequent international visitors. In the early 2000s, alongside Joel Stern and Danni Zuvela, Golding was involved in establishing OtherFilm in Brisbane, where the group forged something of a small renaissance of experimental film in Australia. Golding’s own practice is expanded cinema performance involving 16mm film projection, loops, filters, refracting prisms, rotating mattes and various forms of occasionally cacophonous noise-makers. Using images redolent of Victorian photography she often appears as some ghostly revenant in the work as a human screen for her projections; her performances resemble a nineteenth century séance, careering between elegance and precarious awkwardness as noisy awe-inspiring spectacle.
Writing about Golding’s work, Jonathan Walley places it alongside that of artists from the UK and USA, without reference to the country of origin of any of the artists; perhaps such details are irrelevant. This certainly reflects the international stage that now exists for expanded cinema, with regular festivals across Asia, Europe, and North America. The form has gone global, and the fact of any artist’s national cultural origin has become insignificant in terms of the qualities exhibited in the work they make. If they are particularly identifiably ‘Australian’, they are no longer perceived as some exotic provincial cultural import.
Not Still Life – Sally Golding (photo: Klaus W. Eisenlohr)
The ease of this two-way traffic belies a complex historical colonial and post-colonial relationship between the avant-garde in the UK and Australia, as well as to Australian culture and its international position. This partly extends from the way experimental moving image media practices from the ‘cultural centres’ of Europe and the USA were foundational to Australian practice during the 1960s and ’70s, taking on another life in the ‘new country’, influencing the traffic of artists back to the ‘old country’ perceived as origin and centre.
Negative Light: Contemporary British Experimental Film and Video
Cinema depends on negation. Framing is a form of exclusion; cutting is destructive as well as constructive; the projected image turns on presence and absence; and both film and digital projection involve periods of black or blanking between frames. As such, negation often finds metaphorical resonance in one’s favourite existentialist auteurs (say Robert Bresson or Béla Tarr) but for the most part the negative aesthetics of film and video are suppressed in cinema. In contrast, experimental film and video, which is usually characterised by what it eschews (principally narrative structure), might be defined in terms of negation from the outset. The history of experimental cinema is underwritten by systems and symbols of negation, from recursive strategies that that lead to exhaustion through to different ways in which the image is obliterated. Negation has different aims and ends though. In the tradition of ‘visionary film’ outlined by P. Adams Sitney, for example, the attack on ordinary sight in the imagery of Un Chien Andalou through to the films of Stan Brakhage, allow for the rejuvenation of cinematic vision. In an alternative history, comprising films by artists associated with Dada, Fluxus and the Lettristes, one could plot a lineage that is rather antipathetic towards cinema, envisioned instead as a means of re-imagining the role of media en masse.
The most provocative account of negation to have been published in Britain is Peter Gidal’s ‘Theory and Definition of Structural-Materialist Film.’ Contemporaneous essays by the filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, as well as writing by the critics Deke Dusinberre and A.L. Rees, contributed to an exposition of highly charged aesthetic strategies and their affinity with critical theory, which captured the imagination of filmmakers and film studies alike.
With video not having taken the stage in cultural studies as readily as film, and with British art institutions’ cool reception towards its pioneering video artists, propositions regarding the ‘negative capability’ of video art has not had equal attention in Britain. Still, David Hall’s early essay ‘British Video Art: Towards An Autonomous Practice’ was an important thesis regarding the characteristics of experimental video and the role it might play in overturning default patterns of spectatorship as prescribed by television. Correspondingly, many of Hall’s monitor pieces and installations, from 7 TV Pieces (1971) through to A Situation Envisaged: The Rite (1988) and 1001 TV Sets (2012), are a testament to the fact that the strategies in his practice – images of a burning television, banks of detuned televisions sets, and stacked monitors turned to the wall – often turned on negation.
One of the defining features of experimental film and video in Britain has been its critical stance towards cinema and television. However, a survey of contemporary British artists’ film and video, such as Assembly: A Survey of Artists Film and Video, Made in Britain 2008-2013 (Tate Britain) reveals an ambivalent attitude towards the moving image. Works that involve a critical approach to film, video and digital technology, and related assumptions concerning spectatorship, are in fact marginal to the field. That the moving image is the medium of choice for many artists is not necessarily surprising; after all, the moving image is the dominant mode of visual communication and display. But how could one ever compete with the flow of dramatic image-messages that proliferate ad infinitum on ubiquitous flat screens that range in size from the handheld devices to electronic billboards and cinema screens?